Museum of Life and Science exhibit gets mechanical

DURHAM, Nov 12, 2008 (The Herald-Sun - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- FD | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating -- The buzzing, the clanging, the whirring, the stirring, the humming and the spinning are back at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham.

Artist Steve Gerberich's "Holiday Springs and Sprockets" moving sculpture has returned, retooled and with new additions of "Gerberich's Gadgetry: Art That Moves." It opens Saturday.

Gerberich's machinated wonders were previously exhibited in 2003 and 2006 at the museum. His exhibits are shown in New York City, where he lives, as well as on tour across the country.

He has accumulated 20 years' worth of discarded tea kettles, pulleys, furniture, machinery and leftover parts from everything one might imagine. Putting those together with motors, lights and odds and ends results in his creatively engineered exhibits that took off on Christmas 1991 with the New York Bloomingdale's storefront window.

This exhibit has eight installations, including "Bells and Whistler." Inside what was once probably a China cabinet, an antique phone, bells, weights, the sound from a cuckoo clock and a tiny image of "Whistler's Mother" all rotate like so much metal rotisserie behind glass.

The clock missing its cuckoo is part of the "Stuart Little Tours NYC" wall of moving touristy machinations.

Commissioned by Macy's for the "Stuart Little" sequel, the installation includes Macy's souvenirs plus artifacts that represent the neighborhoods of Chelsea, Times Square, Wall Street, Chinatown, Little Italy, Yorkville and Harlem. Knickknacks include fake money at Wall Street, toys in Chinatown, corks in Little Italy, watches in Times Square and mini-Statues of Liberty throughout.

For those who went to the 2006 exhibit, familiar installations include the "Gift Giving Machine" -- 12 feet by 10 feet of wooden gift shapes that rock and tilt. In front of the wall of presents is a Gerberich automaton -- they all have tea kettles for heads -- with broom arms "distributing" the gifts.

"Flying Reindeer" is back, too, but with a new Santa at the helm. Appearing for the first time is a new Santa made with a tea kettle head and steel cage body encasing a rotating globe that sits on a chair moving with a series of wheels and pulleys and suspending a basket of presents. Santa drives the set of large wooden reindeer on bicycles.

Also familiar is "Industrial Strength Turbo Charged Kitchen," staffed by elves and incorporating previous "Holiday Springs and Sprockets" exhibits such as "Cookie Workshop," "Candy Cane Assembly Plant" and "Egg Nog Machine."

Other installations are the "Amer-o-Matic," a closet that opens and closes revealing a grown man's firefighting gear as well as a child's. Built in 2002 as part of a Sept. 11 theme show in Pittsburgh, Gerberich used several items from a Brooklyn fire station that were going to be discarded.

There's also a "Glam-o-Matic" beauty machine, "Benchwarmers" comprising three automaton baseball players, and "Repedity in Blue," an all-blue installation with Cookie Monster at the helm.

It takes two weeks to set up an exhibit like this. Gerberich keeps and works on his installations in his 1,600-square-foot studio in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn. He uses a bandsaw for most of the creations. His own home though, is sprocket-less and decorated with friends' art.

Gerberich is always on the lookout for new items -- artifacts, as he calls them -- for his work. On the way to work at the museum, he stopped at three yard sales. He enjoys the challenge, he said, of "inventing new machines to continue to question the imagination."

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