Art has always been about the human capacity to see. The sculptures and installations of George Geyer investigate this kind of arena, where the physical properties of matter move and shape the world of human experience. On the face of it the Magnetic Field and Light Compression series that make up this latest body of work are a continuation of the artist's investigations of light and gravity. Like earlier work that balanced, stacked or waved long, thin sheets of glass in sculptures of delicacy and danger, this series also uses the brittle, fragile quality of glass to effectively suggest a tightrope of hazard and balance. But with Geyer's newest addition of powerful magnets dragging sleek industrial plumb bobs into sharp angles he emphasizes the idea that Force, more than any specific systematic principle of physics, is the significant content of his work.
Force is a broad concept.
In nature it suggests power on a scale most find terrifying. That's an area Geyer explored with dynamic poetry in the destructive tides of the Surfline Erosion installation he did in Laguna Beach with Tom McMillin in 1980-81. And Force was the unspoken but clearly understood psychological pressure of denial and compulsion which turned the daunting, impassable floating glass corridor of the 1990 Forbidden Entry into an awesome and intimi-dating rite of passage. So, in one of Geyer's smaller gallery pieces a single wooden clamp splays and dangles three thick sheets of precisely cut triangles of glass. Here Force is presented, not as something overwhelming, but as a precisely applied pressure creating delicate balance and tentative structural integrity.