Baumann's sculpture "Habitat 2067"
subtitled "DNA-2," one of a dozen
works that was on exhibit at his
Omega Studio.

Motion and light...like a high speed night drive through a skyscraping megalopolis...or like the final, flashing scenes from "Star Wars."

Remarkable mechanical imagery: this is what Oswego sculptor Carl Baumann sees around him. And this is the quality of his work that fascinates anyone who sees it.

Baumann, who owns the Omega Studio on 201 East Fifth St., is a former World War II Navy dive bomber and a practicing architect. Both experiences have heavily influenced his sculpture.

"My flying experience started me on the whole idea of space and things in miniature," Baumann remembers. He's done a piece called "City in Space" that literally recreates a view of a modern metropolis as seen from many miles into the atmosphere.

As an architect, Baumann spent several years designing buildings, dwellings, and planning village layouts both here and abroad.

"But buildings are limited," he notes. "They don't satisfy fantasy."

Though he notes influences such as The Bauhaus school of architecture, the geometric painter Mondrian, and the Russian Constructivists, Baumann says his main inspiration has come from his being an architect.

"The main influence on my work has been the so-called 'man-built environment' we live in: science and industry, architecture and city planning...I see the man-made environment as an extension of nature, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, but to be celebrated and responded to." And that's what he does in his art.

"I've been told my sculptures are for kids of all ages. Anybody who hasn't had his or her imagination knocked out of them will enjoy them," he said.

Some pieces like "Land of Oz" and "Oil Refinery" are much different than the pcitured "Habitat 2077." Though they all utilize light and movement, the former are constructed less of plexiglass and more of plain old junk.

"Land of Oz" features bottles, cans, pie tins, funnels, copper pipe, all painted white and embellished by colored lights and lamp decorations to suggest a magical city, rotating on a plane.

"Oil Refinery" is also a tubular construction; black with white lights providing a contrast.

"Cathedral" is a colored-glass model for a huge mobile hanging which could conceivably decorate a modern house of worshop.

"Box Fugue" (a classical music pun), is an eight-foot model of a 20 foot sculpture that Baumann did for the civil Service Employees Building in Albany.

Baumann has participated in a dozen major exhibitions, including shows at Albany, Syracuse, Utica and last year at SUNY Oswego. Partly because of their uniqueness, Baumann's work has met with mixed success. Though viewers are intrigued by it, the established art world isn't quite sure where it fits into the mainstream.

No one's really even sure what to call Baumann's sculptures, not even the artist himself. He's dubbed them 'licons,' a meshing of 'light and construction,' but others refer to them as 'electric sculptures.'

"There's not too many people working the genre," Baumann said. "I think they're unique."

So do other art experts. Edward Cowley, the chairman of the Art department at SUNY Albany where Baumann exhibited in 1967, said his work " is certainly very much a part of our times. It has a quality of magic about it which is terribly important to art and in addition to being an artistic success, it's also kind of a technical triumph."