Location: Mill Valley, CA
Medium: Sculpture, installation, technology
Website: salvagione.com
Paolo Salvagione was born in Chicago, moved with his family to southern France as a child where he developed an affection for bullfighting, and spent his teen years in Albuquerque, New Mexico, occasionally assisting the photographer Joel-Peter Witkin with set construction. He read philosophy in Manhattan before spending half a decade circling the globe setting up bicycle factories from Italy to Indonesia, mastering titanium fabrication at Martin Marietta in Colorado, working on next-generation paint systems for Boeing, and designing hi-tech racing bicycles in Marin. He is an autodidact — and also the son of a printmaker and the grandson of both a sculptor and an architect. For over a decade he served as lead engineer on the 10,000 Year Clock of the Long Now Foundation. He is a 2017 Eureka Fellow of the Fleishhacker Foundation and has been artist-in-residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, Autodesk Pier 9, the Lucid Art Foundation, and the San Francisco Center for the Book.
Salvagione works at the intersection of engineering, participation, and levity. His installations are almost always participatory — invitations to visitors to occupy, activate, or compete within the work rather than simply observe it. He has sent studio visitors out of a second-story window on a 900-pound steel wheel, filled a World War I gymnasium with ten oversized swings and the implicit suggestion that visitors race each other, and created kinetic sculptures that push perceived physical balance past what the eye registers as stable. His practice also extends to scent, tactile objects, and books — a sensory Wunderkammer approach that refuses to privilege any one human sense above another. Humor and craftsmanship, the novel and the banal, operate together throughout his work.
His engineering background is not merely instrumental: the decade-long work on the Long Now Clock — a monument-scale mechanical computer designed to run for 10,000 years — he considers art as much as engineering, and the two disciplines are inextricably wound in his thinking.
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