This week’s Artist Spotlight highlights the kinetic sculptures of Noah Malone, currently featured in our Los Angeles group exhibition, Manual Override.
Noah Malone is a Los Angeles-based artist and sculptor whose work blurs the lines between mechanical function, organic process, and artistic intervention. His kinetic sculptures transform static materials into living, evolving compositions—exposing the delicate interplay between control and chaos, automation and spontaneity.
At the core of Malone’s practice is a fascination with time as both a force and a collaborator. Each of the three mechanisms on display in Manual Override operates using a rotisserie motor, a component typically found in commercial food preparation but here repurposed to animate canvas in an unpredictable, almost ritualistic way. However, before these canvases are ever set into motion, they undergo a process of organic intervention:
First, they are treated with coffee grounds, birdseed, and water, then placed outdoors to become an open invitation to local wildlife. Over several weeks, birds descend, pecking, feeding, and marking the canvas with erratic traces of their presence—scratches, tears, droppings, and remnants of their activity. These canvases, now etched with the unfiltered gestures of nature, are then dried and layered with ink, their final composition shaped by an uncontrollable, external force.
This method subverts the traditional role of the artist as sole creator. By relinquishing control to external, non-human participants, Malone’s work becomes an exercise in co-creation between human intention and natural entropy. The final compositions are not just visual records but physical archives of time, movement, and interaction, transformed once again when mounted onto Malone’s mechanical systems.
The sculptural mechanisms themselves—built without strict blueprints or preplanned schematics—embody a similar ethos. Constructed like straight-ahead animations, their design evolves organically, mirroring the erratic yet instinctual processes of the birds that first shaped the canvases. Their constant, looping motion mirrors the impermanence of thought, capturing the fleeting nature of decision-making and the way ideas shift over time.
The Concept of Manual Override
Malone’s work finds a natural home in Manual Override, an exhibition that explores the collision of industrial machinery, automation, and human agency within contemporary art. The exhibition highlights the way mechanical systems, often relegated to the background of industrial production, can become the focal point of artistic expression. Here, machines are not mere tools but co-conspirators in the act of creation, influencing and reshaping artistic outcomes in ways that are both deliberate and unpredictable.
Through this lens, Malone’s kinetic sculptures ask us to reconsider the relationships between artist, object, and environment. What does it mean to share authorship with natural forces? How do mechanical interventions reshape our understanding of organic processes? And in a world increasingly governed by automation, where does the line between the maker and the machine truly exist?
These questions sit at the heart of Manual Override, inviting viewers to engage with the works not just as passive observers but as participants in a larger dialogue about time, transformation, and the shifting boundaries of artistic control.
View videos of Noah Malone's work in action at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/@goodmothergallery
On View: January 18 – February 8, 2025
📍 Location: Good Mother Gallery, 5103 W. Adams Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90016
🕚 Gallery Hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 11 AM – 5 PM
For more information or to request a digital catalog of available works, please email info@goodmothergallery.com.
