Tony Nicholls’ kinetic dance with Len Lye

Copyright Mark Amery Courtesy and The Dominion Post

I'm getting ‘70s flashbacks at Enjoy Gallery at present. Recall of my father's friends propensity to show off their immaculate, expensive wooden encased hi-fi systems by playing Pink Floyd's seductively sleek Dark Side of the Moon really, really loud. I was forced to sit silently in the middle of rooms listening to the album in its entirety: alarm clocks jolting you from one speaker, a subterranean pulse from another - an experience that's left me suspicious that art which impresses you with shiny whistles and bells is masquerading a marshmallow centre.

Tony Nicholls' impeccably crafted sound sculptures prove far more interesting than this first impression.

Certainly their clean cut modernist lines and lovingly crafted wooden fittings take us back to another time - when the expensive home stereo system as an instrument of emotional power aspired to the Barbara Hepworth sculpture on a pedestal. And certainly the popping rhythm of one woofer here is eerily reminiscent of a section from Pink Floyd's album. Yet Nicholls crafts and fine-tunes things to the point where they're running and sounding like engines that threaten to do some serious damage. You're watching your back. The line of tension between aesthetic appreciation and some imagined cutting industrial function is extremely taut here. Any art that leaves me open mouthed and gulping like a goldfish has got to be worth lingering over.

Driven by domestic amplifiers and speakers, Nicholls' kinetic sculptures are activated by sounds vibrating woofers, which in turn activate slender steel rods which put thread into motion to create ghostly balloons in the air. The sound (played on conventional players) is low and often inaudible, at a frequency below human hearing. In this way sound is magically translated from the aural into the visual, physicalised as sound waves.

The title of the exhibition Aletheia is Greek for truth, or "the state of not being hidden, of being made evident." Nicholls, like sound artists before him, seeks to make us aware of the richness of the aural world around us.

So far, so clever, but its these works elemental charge that, like Nicholls' works most significant ancestor Len Lye, moves you beyond just admiration to find something more mysterious and menacing. The rumble of a speaker connects us to the ground beneath, the lash of string to lightning. In another hark back to the art of the last century (recalled in the inclusion of the likes of Lye and Tinguely in the recent Sydney Biennale) these works end up questioning the power the machine has over us - the combination of beautiful fetish and power generator that has led us to develop things that can annihilate us.

As Tyler Cann notes writing of their work for Govett Brewster Gallery Nicholls' work doesn't so much follow Lye's as create with it a kind of harmonic. While with Lye's kinetic sculpture motion created sound, with Nicholls' sound creates motion.

One of the charms of Lye's work was the sense that it could fall apart (and often did) at any time. There was the tangible sense of extraordinary yet ordinary human endeavour to create something beyond the individual - inspiring you to do the same. Nicholls' work here doesn't quite have that same fragility - the work is far more refined, and is more remote and less affecting for it. One of the nicest touches to counter this in this exhibition is the showing of a work in progress, with the tools and materials there for you to finger.