Celebration of Tim Quinn's Metrospective. A Mid-Life Retrospective Sculpture Installation. Quinn's work, however, is not mere science demonstration. He's learned to add the twist and the heart of art. He doesn't let the algorithm take over completely, intervening at key points in the generation to apply his artistic judgement.
Opening Celebration of
Tim Quinn's
"Metrospective"
A Mid-Life Retrospective
Sculpture Installation
Dangerous Curve
a Downtown Experimental Exhibition
and Performance Art Space
Los Angeles, CA, October 2, 2004 - We're back to our "old" selves,
feeding and edutaining our community with openings in our own grand
style. Consider yourself personally invited as our extra-special
honorary preferred guests to the celebration on Saturday, October 23,
2004, of sculptor, performance artist, and experimental musician Tim
Quinn's mid-career retrospective "Metrospective."
We're back to free chair massages by soulful Tricia Schaumann and lots
of amazing healthy food by master chef John Saslow. Simone Gad is
providing the performance art for the evening.
The legendary experimental violist/singer
Josie Roth and the over-the-top all-girl art band Kittenfreaky are
providing the live music.
Digging through the archeology of Tim Quinn's work, you wonder how a
half a lifetime's work can seem like a whole lifetime's worth. Not only
does it seem like a lifetime's worth of work, but also as if it was the
lifetime's work of several different artists. His work is at times
clean, formal, and analytical, at others, as gritty, chaotic, and
intense as the soul. His huge wooden bishops or his King Pawn, from his
Reinventing Chess project, are elegantly lacquered, as if they were fine
furniture (complete with tables, some of them). His beer bottles and
lightbulbs, wrapped with twine and ropes, some rolled in glitter, or built
up into spiky or flowing shapes with acrylic paint applied with squirt
bottles, are as funky as it gets. His wood ball covered in narrational
metal jewelry stampings and garish plastic wheels is a mix of the two.
A sparkling, intelligent humor pervades Quinn's work, infusing it with
the deep poignancy and self-reflexivity found in the work of legendary
comedians. For instance, he rearranges the mottos on dollar bills into
ridiculous phrases Jumble fashion, or he carves "SAP" into the top of a
tree trunk, or "REVOLUTION" into his truck tire to make prints, or
he "edits" maps by filling in regions between, e.g., roads with a flat
color, or he fashions the head of a "General" out of Sculpy (many
anatomical layers of which are hidden by the final skin), wedging it
into a metal basket "helmet." Even his wood carvings, done with deft
elegance, are crazy spirals, wacky rattles, uneven spiky windowsills,
or strange poles.
Chris Burden, in a 1992 LA Weekly article, said of Tim's fabrication of
Burden's seminal sculpture "Medusa's Head": "It's my vision, but it's
the assistants' hands." Tim says he thinks with his hands. In her
essay, "Urban Artists and the Natural World," curator Marilu Knode calls
Quinn "a tinker" who "jerry-rigs his own contraptions." It's obvious
when you see the complexity of his work, which comes from a hyperfocused
manipulation of materials. For instance, his Sculpy work (recursive
hexagon clusters and other more free-form configurations), are the
product of hours of kneading and rolling; they have so many levels that
the innermost elements are minute enough to require two magnifying
glasses to be distinguishable. Likewise, his squirt-painted objects are
painstakingly evolved from repeated application. It's a lesson in how
to make art: stick with your process long enough, allowing anything to
happen, so that intuition can take over and give you something beyond
what you'd get from your ego-bound self. It's been said that good
artists have one good idea, and that great artists have two. There are
at least two ideas here, if not more.
In the aforementioned essay, Knode notes Quinn's interest in "the
overlap of nature and science," which are exemplified by his Caustic Soda
Battery, his huge steam whistles, his Elevated Garden, his Milk Spilling
Machine that melts beer bottles into molds. Shapes reminiscent of the
DNA double helix show up in many of his works as snakes, snails, and
spirals upon spirals. The torus appears again and again.
Quinn is a known algorist. His early work
done in welded steel pencil rod (the Mastications show) was done in
algorithmic patterns, as were his metal lathe covered shapes (Atreus
Chamber and Screw). An early text "drawing" has topological levels in
which the type weight becomes increasingly heavy as the levels go
higher. This evolved into his leveled hexagon fractals, wherein Quinn
"fits" hexagons with clusters of either 7 or 19 smaller hexagons; again
all the "levels" are represented, with the larger hexagons purposely
left uncovered. Quinn's "retiling space" works, done with 3D software
or with stress balls, are the 3D version of the hexagon fractals.
Quinn's work, however, is not mere science demonstration. He's learned to
add the twist and the heart of art. He doesn't let the algorithm take
over completely, intervening at key points in the generation to apply
his artistic judgement. Quinn's procedural "image enlargings" (in which
he enlarges the image by replicating pieces of it nine times within
their respective regions) are pre(re)cursive to his "image unfolding":
iterative and/or recursive collages wherein he repeatedly applies the
same image-building algorithm to a hand-chosen piece of the image from
the previous stage of the process. (He'd tried repeated image filter
application, but that wasn't interesting enough.) The public saw the
latest of these experiments, "The Goldwild Data," at Dangerous Curve last
winter.
Quinn clearly loves the astronomical universe. His series of planets,
moons, and landscapes done using fractal software are way beyond a mere
superficial investigation. He's currently constructing a series of
globes: an Earth stress-ball fractal one, a Sculpy fleur-de-lis sun, a
clear-glass-marble covered map one, one with the exaggerated map
mountain ridges sanded off and "sun spots" of black epoxy embedded with
paste jewels added. He's just made a three-foot wood ball with
ArsFidelis' (the performance art duo to which Quinn belongs) first
year's props entombed inside.
Quinn loves reinventing things. When a computer program beat the best
human Chess player, he proposed reinventing Chess so that humans could
still win "After all," he writes, "we have one big advantage. We can
cheat." He proposed a new Chess that "emphasizing analogy or metaphor
against a background of constantly shifting, interlocking, self-defining
rules" in an attempt to stay ahead of the machines---for at least a few
more years. Quinn's current large project is a reinvention of another
sort---that of the city of Los Angeles---or at least the Downtown part
where he lives. He learned that the current Downtown largely reflects
something that was first manifested in an architectural model. He hopes
that if he builds a new model, using an artist's vision to "correct" the
urban planning mistakes inflicted on Downtown, someone will see that
model and be inspired to (re)build. You'll have to wait until at least
next year to see this model. In the meantime, come see the past work of
an artist who has humor and heart, and the vision to lead us into the
future.
http://timquinn.nu
Saturday, October 23, 2004
There's no charge, and there's free parking
across the street. The celebration runs from 7:00 to 11:00 p.m. at
Dangerous Curve, located at 1020 East Fourth Place, between Molino and
Mateo Streets, in the back of the 500 Molino Street Lofts, #102, between
the Fourth Street Bridge's two on/off ramps.. The exhibit runs until
November 13. Two weeks after the opening, there's a Performance Art and
Experimental Music/Film Night (see below). During exhibits, the gallery
is open every Wednesday through Saturday, 1:00 to 6:00 p.m.
Dangerous Curve is committed to supporting visionary established and
emerging artists of all ages, by emphasizing one-person shows of risky,
intelligent work that is not necessarily commercially viable nor
currently popular. Dangerous Curve is a new venue for both experimental
exhibits/installations and performance/live art, with performance
residencies, and a performance art festival planned.
Simone Gad performance upcoming in NYC:
January 2, 2005
2:00 p.m.
Bowery Poet's Club
A prestigious venue that's hosted the likes of Eric Bogosian and
the late Spauling Grey.
Other Dangerous Curve events (subject to change):
Performance Art and/or Experimental Music and Film Nights
8:00 p.m.
$5.00 suggested donation to the performers
(no one turned away because of lack of funds or desire to pay)
November 6, 2004
Linda Albertano: veteran performance artist
Bob Bellerue: experimental musician
Ry Rocklen: performance artist
TBA
Contact: Kathryn Hargreaves
213-617-8483
Dangerous Curve
1020 East Fourth Place
(500 Molino Street #102)