Curran is obsessed with books. He is preoccupied with language; allegory, semiotics, hyperbole and all the nuance of the life semantic lay down the track for his train of thought.

“I’m someone who is very influenced by what I read; I’ll read a book and become enamored with an idea or a character in it, to the extent that I’ll use the book to justify my own ideas or alter my personality a bit,” he admits with a tinge of embarrassment. “So, when I paint or sculpt, I end up using letters, characters or entire books to create an image of how I think someone thinking would look.”

From this admission, one might expect Curran’s work to be wholly literal; however, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, in many works, he strives to connect otherwise unrelated segments of texts to form a unique representation of the concept at hand. When creating the kinetic sculpture Cream: A Study in Instant Gratification, for example, the artist wanted to take a different perspective on studies like Duchamp’s Chocolate Grinder—wherein mechanical motion is used as an allegory for sexual union—by utilizing an entomological volume on butterflies and “one of the most amazing books [he’d] ever found”: a 600 page text containing everything there is to know about ice cream. These books were deconstructed, cut-up and refurbished as the sardonic backdrop for an interactive, kinetic sculpture showcasing the elegant movement of two butterflies in flight. It is these often counter-intuitive juxtapositions that make Curran’s living library so much more than a simple homage to literature.

"We can look at the text of any book and see the wealth of information contained in the writing, but in addition to the writing we can see a structured assembly of signs. It is the values we place on those visual arrangements that describe the meaning of the signs. Meaning thus evolves from meaning. This emergence gives rise to an awareness of not only the visual element, but also, more importantly, to the relationship between one sign and another."

No less fascinating is Curran’s prowess as an engineer. Building upon the work of such artists as Arthur Ganson and Alexander Calder, he painstakingly constructs the mechanisms that operate his delicate wireframe sculptures; often leaving a complex system of gears, cranks and pulleys in clear view, to be appreciated separately but equally. Thus the viewer is engaged on multiple levels as they interact with each device and the entirety of this interactive experience becomes a work of art, in and of itself. As one infuses the work with kinetic energy, the gears start turning, literally and metaphorically, to set Curran’s vision in motion.

“There is the desire to showcase the effort I put into engineering each piece and with multiple books making up a larger composition I am able to showcase more of the mechanisms,” Curran acknowledges, “but, ultimately, I just want to engage people for more than 30 seconds.”

And engage he does; not just in his sculpture, but also in his “word composition” paintings. Using a sepia tone which nods to the engineering schematics of antiquity, Curran creates beautifully painted and meticulously encrypted manuscripts that bring together the disciplines of fine art, linguistics and engineering. Each oil on panel painting contains some manifesto or message from the artist; embedded, like a mathematical proof, in the compound characters, formulaic relationships, and engineering principles depicted.

Curran’s entire body of work is as full of nuance and contradiction as any individual work of art therein, but there is always a clear, unique voice dictating its direction. One cannot place this body of work in any one category of art; rather there is a confluence of disciplines that flows throughout. It is, perhaps, Curran’s appreciation for innumerable perspectives that allows the work in Structuralism to excite, enamor, and surprise on so many levels.