ANN ARBOR.- The University of Michigan Museum of Art opened the exhibit Gregory Barsamian: Time and Transformation through September 17. Internationally acclaimed New York-based artist Gregory Barsamian (Armenian-American, b. 1953) creates three-dimensional animated sculptures that explore the language of the subconscious and celebrate the nature of dreams. In this exhibition, several of the artist's major kinetic sculptures illustrate the scientific principle of the persistence of vision, which is the phenomenon by which the human brain "fills in the blanks" between sequential images seen in rapid succession, creating an illusion of continuous motion. This phenomenon is most commonly exemplified by motion pictures and film. Utilizing rotating mechanical armatures and synchronized strobe lights, Barsamian creates works of art that seem to, inexplicably, morph familiar objects in unexpected ways to suggest visual narratives of the mind.

Gregory Barsamian was born in Chicago, Illinios and currently he lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His works are animated sculpture: through the use of rotating mechanical armatures and synchronized strobe lights, three-dimensional objects move horizontally and vertically and change their shapes in real time. The inspiration for this strange and wonderful world are animation techniques that predate the film such as the zoetrope, flip book and phenakistiscope, all of which are based on the "persistence of vision," in other words, afterimage. Under the influence of psychologist C.G. Jung, his work is dream-based and so in each of them, the viewer is likely to experience the amazing and provocative reality of dreams.