LAKELAND, FLA.- Visitors to the Polk Museum of Art at Florida Southern College got a taste of Gino Miles’ work when the museum installed one of his sculptures at its entrance in 2016.

The gift of that sculpture titled “Introspection” from Clearwater couple Moshe and Ella Kedan led to the exhibition “Bound Ascension: The Sculpture of Gino Miles,” which runs through Jan. 14.

Miles works primarily in fabricated stainless steel and bronze. The curvilinear, often weightless appearance of his pieces creates a visual contradiction with the heavy metal materials from which they are made. His large-scale sculptures are designed to be touched, turned and viewed from different vantage points.

Some are so large that special arrangements were made to get them into the exhibition. The largest piece is titled “Shelter,” and required a crane to lift it over the museum walls and into the Sculpture Courtyard. It measures 16 feet long, 8 feet six inches wide, and stands 8 feet three inches tall. It weighs roughly 1 ton.

Several sculptures in the exhibition are a series of aluminum cubes and columns that represent the dots and dashes of Morse code.

A native of the Western slopes of Colorado, Miles earned a master’s degree in sculpture from the University of Northern Colorado in 1979.

He lived in Florence, Italy for a number of years and helped found Italart, a school for American and German students in the Chianti region. He also taught design and sculpture classes while making and exhibiting his own pastels and sculpture.

Miles and his wife reside in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and he owns and operates his own gallery, Sculpture 619.