Michael Leeds debuts a new exhibit at First Friday Nov. 2. (Photo by Chip Scheuer)
With a hospital wheel, an industrial light and 19th century oiler in front of him, Michael Leeds is musing on his most recent Tim Burton-esque metal sculpture.
“It’s like a spy bot,” he says of the art piece. This one has a bloodshot eyeball at the center of the bulb and a red antenna on top, like a cherry on a sundae.
Leeds, a well-known local sculptor and glassmaker, is gearing up for his first motorcycle art show in 10 years—an exhibit opening at this month’s First Friday celebration at Leeds Gallery, which is run by Michael and his younger brother Mattie. The show pulls from his disparate collections, including the motorcycle creations that helped make him a Santa Cruz icon, as well as his recent dabblings in graphic art.
But for the moment, 67-year-old Leeds is standing in his metal shop in red overalls with a pencil in his breast pocket. His fingers are stout and muscular—their crevices filled with grease that would take weeks to fully wash out. Leeds is explaining to me the significance of these scattered artifacts that came together into one still-unnamed bot.
“Each part is iconic,” he says. “It talks about the use [the part] had in their culture, and it talks about the design aesthetic of the time they occupied. It’s very anthropological. There are moments that make us who we are. Then you bring all these pieces together and into one story.”
That story, in part, is one of new energy. The fictional bot could run off energy from an electromagnetic crystal, Leeds says. He is working on similar creations that run on other forms of green energy, like machines that are powered by sound.
Basically, the new line of fake machines is somewhere between Willy Wonka and Henry Ford. Just don’t expect these models to run.
“That’ll never happen now,” Leeds says. “But it’s easy to realize that things we consider commonplace now—you would have been burned at the stake if you said they were possible 100 years ago! Seriously, fucking Galileo lived [for years] under house arrest because he believed Copernicus instead of the church.”
The creations fuse futuristic ideas with elements of an industrial past. It speaks to one of Leeds’ great talents, doing more than one thing at a time. The artist, who constantly switches from graphic art to glasswork and metal sculpting, likes dualisms and pieces that work on multiple levels.
The exhibit will also feature old friends like “Smokey Joe,” a bike sculpture made mostly out of wood with his then-six-year-old son that looks like it actually puttered out of The Coasters’ 1955 hit “Smokey Joe’s Café.” The show will also include his “Electro Lux” piece made out of old neon light parts, including leftovers from Regal’s Santa Cruz 9 theater sign, which he built in the early 1990s.
His motorcycles, like the “spy bot,” pull pieces from bygone eras—cheese slicers, vacuum tubes, musical instruments and “all this iconic stuff,” he says. Leeds who calls himself “dogmatic” by nature, likes to challenge his own notions of reality—and everyone else’s while he’s at it.
And from the second people glance at one of his motorcycle sculptures, they start wondering what’s real.
“There is a feeling it’s a motorcycle,” Leeds says. “Then they start to see the handlebars are ice cream scoops. And for that moment they get to toggle between what they thought it was and what it really is. It becomes a nice place to dwell.”
Michael Leeds
First Friday, Nov. 2. Leeds Gallery
