Dangerous Curve
Los Angeles
1020 Fourth Place - 500 Molino Street #102
213 6178483
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Metrospective
dal 22/10/2004 al 13/11/2004
213-617-8483
WEB
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Dangerous Curve


approfondimenti

Tim Quinn



 
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22/10/2004

Metrospective

Dangerous Curve, Los Angeles

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.


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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)

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