A new exhibit at the Bedford Gallery in downtown Walnut Creek, Ned Khan: Seed Vortex, is on display through March 25th.
From the exhibition page:
This winter, the Bedford presents the work of Bay Area sculptor Ned Kahn in a solo show that studies the artists’ lifelong fascination with the confluence of science and art. At the center of the show is Seed Vortex, Kahn’s enormous metal sculpture weighing thousands of pounds and spanning 20 feet in diameter.
Seed Vortex shifts a transient sea of tiny mustard seeds in a slow, constant and captivating spin, addressing life’s puzzles, like eternity, unity, chaos and change. The inspiration for Seed Vortex goes back to the 1980s when Kahn was an artist-in-residence at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. There, he explored the Physics of the Granular State, an emerging field of science that studied the way powders, sand and other dry, granular materials moved. Kahn created a series of interactive sculptures at the Exploratorium that encouraged viewers to influence and observe the patterns of granular motion. This work led to Negev Wheel, which Kahn made in 2016 for the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco and filled with sand from Israel’s Negev Desert.