Thomas Kurtz is one of the finest artists working in automata today: with gears and cogs, he pieces together the leering mechanical skeletons of his anachronistic mechanical men. Numbered amongst his automatons are the Rafaj (an experimental prototype of a hookah-smoking Turk), the Montebanker (a Mephistophelean cup-and-ball trickster) and the Plague Hymn (a decomposed corpse playing the pipe organ). I sometime imagine I am the sole survivor inhabiting the post-apocalypse: I live in an empty mansion full of such automata and, pockets full of nickels, spend my days wandering the halls, winding my friends to life.
Thomas Kuntz [Artist's Site]
