Art that Moves

To state the obvious, kinetic art is moving art — literally and, in the best instances, qualitatively. Art of the kinetic kind, by its nature a peripheral slice of the fine art world, has made its presence known only rarely in Santa Barbara, making the major new Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB) group show Falling into the Future: Kinetic Art at the Edge of the World a special occasion. 

For the record, there have been notable connections of this broad-based medium to the city’s arts scene over the years. Famed kinetic art practitioner sculptor George Rickey had his sleek, moveable steel sculptures displayed outside the Santa Barbara Museum of Art for years, and a major multi-gallery exhibition in 1990 hosted by The David Bermant Foundation, known as Pulse 2, seized the attentions of art-watchers and the general public.

The Bermant Foundation is also a key player in the MCASB exhibition, as a primary influence and part of the support system for this ambitious and multi-pronged undertaking. Jean Cocteau’s film Jean Cocteau Addresses the Year 2000, a 1963 speculation on the shape and texture of the future, screens in MCASB’s glass box outside the entrance and serves as a kind of intellectual welcome mat introduction to what’s inside. 

What’s inside are artistic matters of a kinetic sort, but in this case, mostly involving the motion of video manifestations, filling the gallery with visual stimuli in motion, along with assorted sonic sources in the space. An as-yet revealed, but important, component of the show involves a cooperation with UCSB’s senses-engulfing immersive chamber the AlloSphere. Three of the exhibition’s artists have created elaborate pieces for the AlloSphere’s three-dimensional — and four-dimensional — space, to be unveiled and unleashed on November 15.

Meanwhile, at MCASB, the globally diverse selection of artists includes Santa Barbara’s own veteran artist-thinker Mary Heebner, who takes over a corner of the gallery with her visions of Aphrodite — goddess of love and beauty — and Persephone in various media. Mythic female deities are seen in silhouette, as suspended aluminum cutout and two-dimensional treatments, set into relief and kinetically coated with a backdrop video of the rippling Aegean Sea, a central home to Greco-Roman mythology.

From antiquity to future visions, Ayoung Kim’s “The Underwater Response” is a two-channel video work, a fictional sci-fi scenario based on the “Surisol Underwater Lab” and an interview between a robotic overseer and a potential humanoid applicant, a Muslim woman. The scenario is also a pretext for sensuous, liquidous visual imagery in motion.

Motion, per se, is not inherent in the extra-horizontal abstract color fandango by Chanel Khoury, in the case of her aptly and playfully titled “laaaaa….ndscaaaa….. pe.”

In the center of the gallery floor, Kelly Akashi’s “Reliquary (Devil’s Claw)” confers an atavistic or alien presence in the space, while bearing silent witness to the ravages of the Altadena fire of 2025, which destroyed the artist’s home and studio. 

Additional works include Diana Thater’s “Yes, there will be singing” (a nod to a Bertolt Brecht poem) installation; Nicaraguan artist Patricia Belli’s “Recuerdos,” dealing with personal and national trauma and upheaval; the unconventional sound-sculptural work “Kihikihi Wawā,” by New Zealanders Anne Niemtez and Newton Chan; and side gallery transformed by artist Manjari Sharma through her dizzying video montage project “Metamorphosis.” The sum effect becomes a swirling and morphing myriad of a dreamscape, with visions of personal reference and abstract invention. The piece verges on the hallucinatory, weaving and dodging between real world and imaginary realms, without clear delineations between those modes.

Motion sickness could be a result, we might assume. But instead, we are pulled willingly into the sensory and referential vortex of the artist’s devising. That could be a takeaway hallmark of these otherwise disparately oriented artists in Falling into the Future, who use motion and future thinking visions to tap new banks of ideas.

Falling into the Future is on view at the MCASB (653 Paseo Nuevo) through May 1, 2027. See mcasantabarbara.org/falling-into-the-future-kinetic-art-at-the-edge-of-the-world.