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Every once in a while, a show will remind me why I started down the path of art in the first place. Tim Hawkinson at LACMA is one of those shows.

This is Hawkinson’s first comprehensive solo show in nine years, and represents a body of work spanning a period of two decades. With remarkable range in scale, material, and concept, Hawkinson fills the LACMA galleries with a pulsating, kinetic, universe of sculpture, painting, photography and mechanical contraption. Some favorite pieces include a tiny, perfect, jewel-like sculpture of a bird skeleton made entirely from crazy glue and the artist’s fingernail clippings; a row of gears that starts fast-spinning and dime-size, growing to an enormous end gear which revolves once every hundred years; an old-fashioned school desk with a mechanical arm that signs the artist’s name over and over onto a moving spool of paper, which is then automatically cut forming a huge pile of signatures.

Then there’s “Secret Sync”, a tableau of common household objects - hairbrush, briefcase, measuring tape, etc. - which have been subtly transformed into clocks, each secretly revealing time with one another.

I walked from piece to piece with a growing sense of wonder at Hawkinson’s world of seemingly infinite, magical, possibility.

- David Lawrence [Monday, August 29th, 2005]

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