Martin Munson

Martin Munson returns to the Cloverdale plaza this year with “Wind Monometer”, a kinetic sculpture with 12 moving parts. Munson’s kinetic works are intended as environmental interpretive “tools”. Sculptural mass in motion is a metaphor for harnessing and utilizing natural resources. His work addresses the success and failure of man’s technological prowess versus Mother Nature’s continuances.

Munson responds to his environment as a resource as well as the collective affect of his life’s experience. His materials are mostly recycled. The experience of technology and reclamation is visible in his sculptures, creating contrast between natural and mad-made forms. Parts of his work appear organically reclaimed, while other images look technologically processed. His work is a response to the struggle between the powers of nature; nature’s endurance and slow reclamation, versus man’s ability and inability to control this process.  He has a life-long fascination with the way things react under stress, seeing both weakness and beauty in the inner qualities of materials that are “excavated” or “torn away”. “Even though these elements are man-made”, he stated, “the force used to disturb them was the essence of physics, and I was the catalyst of that action and reaction.”

Photo by Tedd Peterson