Michael Aurbach is a contemporary sculptor and educator who explores death, secrecy, and critical theory using mixed media such as plexiglass, archeticural design, and industrial lab equipment.
His work is at once playful yet always already a very serious challenge to the audience (or spectator or viewer or patron or interpreters) to exercise their imagination for the purpose of decoding the array of signs and symbols which are the raw materials of Aurbach's oology of contemporary life (or stasis or death or (non)existence or being). Many of his more recent pieces are highly intricate Rube Goldberg machines with labels such as Essence of Derrida or Extract of Foucault.
As an art student in Kansas during the late 1970s, he noticed that the language used to describe art creation seemed preoccupied with violence and death (executing pieces of art, shooting photographs, hanging paintings (and so on)) which caused him to share in Picasso's realization that every act of creation is an act of desctruction.
Aurbach has received bachelor's degrees in biology, studio art, art history, journalism, and a master's in sculpture.
Aurbach currently teaches at Vanderbilt University in Nashville (although he will from time to time take up a temporary residency at another university or college, as is the common pedagogical practice), on whose web servers his portfolio may be viewed. He is also listed at the International Sculpture Center.
Note however that the images on neither of those websites relay a full sense of the scale of his work. This brief video gives a fleeting sense of what his work is like. But really, to get a more approximate sense of the secrecy and death and theory which this sculptor sculpts from unassuming material, one must walk around the objects for oneself.