The American artist and self-appointed “Chairman of the Hoard” Nemo Gould creates kinetic sculpture art from the vast body of vintage materials that catch his eye and find a home in his studio. The artist spends considerable time hunting for new materials and the result is a body of sculptures that push viewers to engage with concepts far beyond the immediate objects themselves.

The sculpture artist lives and works in Oakland, California, USA. He holds a BFA at the Kansas City Art Institute, and an MFA from the University of California at Berkeley. The artist’s current practice in kinetic assemblage has arisen out of a sense of dissatisfaction with traditional art methods and materials. This comes as a result of a lengthy creative journey that began when Gould was a child. He discusses his early years, telling STIR “When I was young, I was fascinated with stop motion animation, and imagined that I would pursue it as a career. As I came of age, computer graphics had changed the industry and I found I didn’t have the temperament for it. I found that making objects move in the real world provided the sort of magic I had wanted to find through animation. This led to a real love affair with machines and humankind's long history of empowerment through them.”

Gould identifies that the United States has a rather troubling history with one machine in particular: the gun. The artist’s recently concluded series Trigger Warning is an attempt to untangle his clinical fascination for the engineering marvel that they represent, with the undeniable horror of the violence that they cause.

The artist introduces Trigger Warning, telling STIR “When 2020 brought us a global pandemic, the US also began to suffer from a whole mess of political and social problems. Gradually, it seemed that all subtle differences of opinion widened into binary positions. Substance addiction and income inequity became a dominant part of urban landscapes, and mass shootings took on the dull familiarity of weather reports. I found myself caught up in the dread and urgency of this and felt helpless. My primary coping mechanism has always been humour, so I decided to solve America’s problems the American way: through satire. I got to work making a specific gun for each problem I could identify.” 

Target Audience, one of the sculptor’s particularly captivating sculptures  from the Trigger Warning series, was meant to illustrate the damage that bad faith media and journalism can do to society. The work is composed of various miscellanea that have been sculpted together to form a light machine gun fused with parts of a vintage video projector. The machinegun bears a striking resemblance to an MG-42, which is infamous for its deployment by the German army during the Second World War. The artist’s sculpture creates a disturbing connection between modern, media-saturated societies and the Third Reich, which itself had a government that took a particular interest in information and media, in order to motivate its citizenry to participate in horrific, systematised violence.

There is an unmistakably steampunk aesthetic present within Gould’s sculpture art. He acknowledges this, explaining that he enjoys the spirit and world building of steampunk, but he has been careful to set his work apart from it.  In Gould’s words: “Sometimes, I feel as though the genre suffers from too much fetishisation of mechanical language without a firm enough understanding of it. The craftsmanship and engineering of the machine age were truly a marvel. Art that celebrates that has my full support, but when I see gears glued together to look machine-like, I’m less pleased.” The sense of anachronism that such aesthetic values bestow upon the artist’s craft also put forth the argument that these problems have always existed, but our scope for self-harm as a species continues to grow exponentially.

Gould is disarmingly frank with regards to his present situation as an exhibiting artist. “I have not succeeded in securing much of a place in the art world," he says. "So I typically produce my own exhibitions by renting and converting unused retail storefronts in my city. We are just starting to see our downtown emerge from the pandemic years, but unfortunately, I have not had many opportunities to show work recently.” While Gould is certainly pleased to have been able to put up a portion of the Trigger Warning series in a storefront window recently, he expresses that this sculpture installation is not the avenue he believes that the series deserves. It is, nonetheless, a start.

Gould adds: “Having basically finished my latest series of works, I hope very much to find a suitable venue to exhibit it. Concluding the work has been very good for me emotionally, as though I’ve exorcised some sort of demon that was haunting me.” While the artist acknowledges that the work was necessary, he now looks forward to pursuing some lighter, more formalist and figurative subject matters, as he has done in the past. As the sculptor puts it: “I’ve long felt that humour and satire are essential to appreciating life. I want to get back to providing that for people.”