Gary Justis is an Associate Professor at Illinois State University's School of Art. He has a BFA <1976> from Wichita State University and a MFA <1979> from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Justis has been making and exhibiting sculpture for over twenty eight years. His work has been included in exhibitions and in the permanent collections of nationally renowned museums and private galleries. In 2005, Justis completed a major commission for the Illinois Capital Development Board titled World Engine, which is installed in Illinois State University's College of Business.

Justis' sculptures reflect his life-long fascination with the cause-and-effect operations of machinery. Using a visual vocabulary of aluminum, steel, plastic, wood, glass, and fabric he fabricates mechanical and kinetic sculptures that often include motors, sound, and video. Within these elegantly articulated sculptures he formulates metaphors for the complexity and imperfection of human actions.

Head on Horizon, a constructed, highly abstracted landscape made of wood, aluminum, and glass, was first exhibited in 2001 at the Tarble Arts Center at Eastern Illinois University and again in 2002 at Kent State University. The sculpture is based on a visual event that Justis witnessed on the bedroom wall in his Chicago apartment. Projected light from car headlights compressed low-lying forms, in shadow, onto the single flat surface of Justis' bedroom wall. As cars approached and rolled past, the projected shadows provided an endless variation of silhouetted forms and shapes. Justis reflected that "every instance of activity within the shadows of those objects was unrelated but I began constructing a visual story from the accumulating collection of silhouetted forms."

In Head on Horizon: Redux, Justis projects a digital animation onto the 2001 version. This addition expands both the ideas provoked by the original event of projected silhouettes and the overall visual experience of the sculpture. Justis attempts to channel "other areas of human memory and our tendency to construct stories… from the sensations produced by objects in the landscape and those object's material willingness to function as visual markers in a shared experience."

Head on Horizon: Redux is generously sponsored by Jobie & Irving Tick and Jack, Linda & Ashley Ritter.