Lazy Eye Gallery
Nathan Ober
Bell Tower
November 21 – January 25, 2026
Gallery Hours: By appointment only
In the aftermath of weeks of sporadic, torrential rains, the dirt roads leading to Lazy Eye Gallery had collapsed into a chain of dark pools, the Mojave dissolving into mud, treacherous and unstable. Approaching the former water tower that now houses the gallery, a low, sanguine glow pulsed from within. Inside, the space is just wide enough for one viewer, its improbable height offering the only reprieve from the compression of timeworn plywood and exposed structural steel. Sound-based installation artist Nathan Ober answers this constraint with a canopy of bells, each derived from the same mathematical curve yet cast or 3D-printed in divergent sizes and materials.
They bloom downward like metallic and resinous flowers, an aerial biome of attenuated instruments. Some hold faint amber glows, others the patinated surfaces of cast bronze. Small speakers nest in their throats; still others shelter delicate striker mechanisms triggered by signals moving through a lattice of wires. A plexiglass module bearing fifty-two miniature amplifiers anchors the network, its cables spilling outward and rising again to meet the hanging assembly. Columns of tiny red LEDs flare like a synthetic spine, as though the tower had evolved its own nervous system.
The sounds coursing through the installation draw from the land itself: Ober conducted field recordings of birds and insects, and wired sensors through meat thermometers to capture the irregular murmurs of a compost heap. A thousand lines of code, written in a state of semi-lucid automatism, orchestrate the bells’ activation cycles. Their archaic tintinnabulation recalls David Tudor’s 1973 Rainforest IV, though here the resonance feels metabolic, as if one had stepped into a hidden ecology running low-frequency subroutines. Moisture, microbes, mineral gradients, and root-fine signals form a computational substrate, the desert executing its own slow, subterranean logic. Atop the tower, aeolian harps constructed by the artist channel wind into a chorus of spectral tones.
Mounted in the corner is a small, severe plaque: “THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS.” With its Dust Bowl origins and current cultural resurgence intact, the phrase enters Ober’s circuitry to read less as protest than as a principle of system dynamics. Ossified hierarchies advance toward stasis, then erode from within as energy leaches downward. Regimes in retrograde enter terminal drift, persisting as hollow architectures long after their animating forces have collapsed. In the cold continuity of physics, entropy prevails, sifting matter and meaning alike into history’s dustbin. Ober renders this not as metaphor but as demonstration, the tower’s overhead array revealing a world already reorganizing itself beneath our feet. The soil cries out for an encore.
Text by Jed Ochmanek
Nathaniel Ober is a sound-based installation artist living and working in Yucca Valley, CA. With a creative practice spanning installation, sculpture, sound, digital prototyping, astrophysics and the sciences, Ober's work is heavily inspired by, and often in collaboration with the natural world, and gives voice to the landscapes that surround us. His work has been featured at the San Francisco Center for New Music, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Parque Explora in Medellín Colombia, Arteles Creative Center in Finland, International Symposium on Electronic Art, as well as leading education and research programs in several universities and has been awarded many residencies across the globe.
Ober holds an MFA from the Digital Arts + New Media program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a BFA from the Columbus College of Art and Design.