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San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art

July 3 - September 20, 2010

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560 South First Street San Jose, CA 95113
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Conservation of Intimacy Installation detail
Opening Reception: Fri, July 16, 6-8 PM An immersive sculptural installation presented in partnership with the O1SJ Biennial Art and Technology Festival (September 16 – 19). In true Silicon Valley fashion, Lubell has created his low-tech machines in his San Francisco garage for over twenty years. However, instead of working with computers, software, and electronics, the artist collaborates with pine wood and ancient technologies—cranks, pulleys, and springs, for instance—to build the immersive and interactive works. The deliberate handmade aesthetic, along with the ingenuity of the complex designs, give Lubell’s works the appearance of a different era—a time of the master craftsmen and old technology. The creations are in fact deeply rooted in the artist’s research and explorations of historic scientific instruments and obsolete machinery. Lubell’s Conservation of Intimacy serves as a stage where people are invited to touch and play with the work—an unlikely, but thrilling, proposition in the context of the “do not touch” policy in the gallery and museum environment. As participants crank, rock, and create sounds with the work, they tap into what the artist describes as the “vast reservoir of knowledge stored in each of our bodies,” and become important collaborators in the realization and understanding of this massive installation. Born in Baltimore, MD Lubell is based in San Francisco, CA. His interactive installations have exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at FACT, Liverpool and V2 in Rotterdam. Lubell has received numerous awards including and Award of Distinctio n from Ars Electronica, an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation grant in 2009 and Pollack Kranser Foundation Grants in 2002 and 1991.