Against Gravity - sculptor and installation artist Tom Shannon, various galleries and museums

Tom Shannon's visually perplexing sculptures and installations allude to unseen forces better known to physics--and to "Star Trek" fans--than to conventional art.

Tom Shannon is both an artist and an inventor. For over 30 years, he has created objects derived from the macro- and sometimes microcosmic relationships of phenomena in our universe, thus taking into account bodies and forces far beyond the sphere, cone and cylinder that Cezanne saw as underlying all nature. A number of Shannon's objects have practical applications and have been granted patents from the U.S. government--such as the Telephysical Phone (1973), which transmits both voice and touch, or the Synchronous World Clock (1986), which tells us the time of day throughout the world at a single glance. Other works are more visionary in nature, like his proposed Airborne Islands (conceived in 1973, illustrated in photomontages in 1979), tropical landscapes covered by transparent domes that would float about a mile above the earth and wander to various locations around the planet. But whether pragmatic or visionary, all of Shannon's projects possess a self-conscious, human dimension, one that he believes can have a positive effect on our future. Becoming more aware of physical fields, molecular structures and the workings of the mind, he recently told an interviewer, can bring us closer to "correcting the problems that continually plague humanity. "(1)

Similar concerns were at the heart of the controversial theories of Buckminster Fuller, the revolutionary architect and engineer who devoted his life to creating designs intended to solve the problems of modern living. Shannon attended Fuller's memorable lectures while a student at the Art Institute of Chicago (where the artist received an MFA in 1971). But Shannon's interest in modern technology can be traced to his youth; his father was a professional inventor and manufacturer, with over 40 patents to his name. When only 19 years old, Shannon created Squat (1966), a large robotic device that undulates when one touches the leaf of a plant to which it has been electronically connected. This work was included in Pontus Hulten's exhibition "The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age," at MOMA in New York in 1968.

More recently, Shannon has evoked our relationship to atomic structures and our physical connection to the earth's magnetic field (through what he calls our "animal magnetic polarities"(2)) as viewers walk through Compass Moon Atom Room (1990-91), a room-filling installation that consists of 270 separate spheres placed in equidistant suspension on a series of thin nylon threads stretched from the ceiling to the floor. The spheres are painted black on one side, white on the other, and each contains a magnet imbedded within its core. Orienting themselves to the earth's poles, the spheres all face the same direction. Yet when one ball is rotated, the local magnetic force causes all to turn in unison, maintaining their alignment.

Shannon has used magnets in his work since the late 1970s. Most dramatically, they have enabled him to levitate objects ranging in size from 6-inch-long rectangular blocks of wood appearing in numerous small sculptures from the late 1980s to a 23-foot-long needle of magnesium in The Compass of Love (1981). Occasionally he has combined these floating objects with various other materials--marble, silver, polished bronze--creating sculptures reminiscent of the refined, totemic forms of Brancusi. Some works are kept intentionally austere: the capstone of a pyramid hovers mysteriously in space, or a simple geometric element lingers a few inches above the ground without any visible means of support (the magnet within it repelled by another hidden within a table or implanted under the floor). In all cases, the detached components are held in position by a thin thread, a necessary tethering device that Shannon has come to accept as an integral part of the work. This thread not only keeps the levitating object in place but also provides a physical reminder of an invisible wave field upon which the object rests.

A concept of typically expansive dimensions informs a series of works Shannon made in the 1970s and '80s. Collectively titled "Astronomics 109," the pieces are all based on his contention that the prime number 109 recurs mysteriously throughout the solar system. In The Ray (1986), for example, a single 33 1/2-foot conical shaft of bronze, lying horizontally atop a thin base of polished stone placed on the floor, represents the cone of light radiating to the earth from the sun, whose diameter, Shannon had earlier discovered, is 109 times greater than that of the earth. When making this work, he also determined that the earth is separated from the sun by an increment of 109 sun diameters. Later, designing a similar object to represent the distance between the earth and the moon (Moons, 1987), Shannon found that the gap is equal to 109 moon diameters, a remarkable correspondence that led him to focus on similar factors of 109 in the mass and distance ratios of several other planetary bodies.