This artist uses whirligigs to tell an anti-capitalist fairy tale

Here, a figure sweeps their scythe. And there, they gather fruit. In one, a man pulls a mule with his cart, and in another, the pilot of a flying machine spies on the action below. With turbines, levers, wind catchers and cranks, Tony Romano's kinetic sculptures each act out a curious little scene.

In a solo exhibition called The Big Hat, at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ont., you'll find the artist's contraptions arranged on a maze of candy-coloured display bases. Nearby, the sculptures perform in a short film, where their story is unspooled. Though you've never heard it before, it's a tale you already know deep in your bones:

Once upon a time, there was a community of whirligigs. The merry little gadgets worked by the wind, harvesting shapes and trading amongst each other so everyone had just what they needed. Then, one day, a strange man with a big hat arrived. He told the whirligigs that if they'd learn to operate by hand, they wouldn't need the wind anymore; they could work whenever they wanted and grow rich. He would show them how, he said, for just a small price. So the whirligigs went to work for the man, dreaming of wealth and power and big hats of their very own. But the man's help was costly, and the whirligigs toiled without rest, until one day, they could no longer hear the wind over the rhythm of the giant, unceasing machine they'd formed.

It's a decidedly Marxist fairy tale — Antonio Gramsci by way of the Brothers Grimm. And it articulates a tension that the artist, who nine-to-fives at his family's fabrication shop, considers often: "the desire for beauty and living a good life, and then, the reality of work." Here it's conceived as a problem so rudimentary, yet so grand and fantastical, that it's best told in the form of a children's story.

For Romano, whose practice often considers craft, trade and labour, the subjects of art and work are intertwined. He grew up in his dad's shop, and his first art lessons came after his father did a job for Station Gallery in Whitby, Ont. As a kid, the scrapyard was like a museum, he remembers. He'd see an old fridge or a bicycle and think: "It's all going to be melted down and come back to my shop, and then one day, I'm going to make something new out of it."

Similar impulses drive his art-making today, with explicit interests in the lifecycle of materials, the craft involved in their manipulation and the basic creative project of taking one thing and seeing the possibility of another. Recently, for example, inspired by the tradition of church misericords, he presented a series of intricate narrative relief carvings made in the undersides of furniture. In another project, he transformed a small Canadian war tank into a series of figural sculptures as well as a new railing for a Legion branch and a viewing bench (where visitors could watch a video of the artist dismantling the vehicle).

The Big Hat, too, was made almost entirely from scrap and found materials. If you look closely, you'll notice old tractor parts, an axe head and the bones of other farm equipment. Romano has been salvaging the metal relics he finds buried in the ground around his farmhouse in Warkworth, Ont. Like the characters in his story, these are the shapes he has been growing.

His crude sculptures riff on the folky weather vanes and garden ornaments made by farmers and other non-traditional artists. Romano similarly sees his whirligigs as "quick, gestural pieces." He began making them purely for fun, without a larger project in mind. Then, however, they began to tell the artist their story. 

"The biggest con in the world," he says, is the capitalist promise that everything will become easier. "It does get easier," he continues, "but you become more part of the machine."

So what is The Big Hat's warning for an audience already in thrall to the great clickety-clacking contraptions of modern life? 

There are natural rhythms of the world and the body that are important to heed, he says. The mind and the spirit experience whims and curiosities that ought to be pursued. Don't let the drone of the machine cause you to neglect them.

"Don't forget about the wind," he says.

Tony Romano's The Big Hat is on view through September 8 at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ont. and the exhibition Not Here, Not There runs through June 29 at Franz Kaka in Toronto.