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11/5/2005

Tim Quinn

Los Angeles Center For Digital Art - LACDA, Los Angeles

Blowups

Tim Quinn is known for making lots of different kinds of artworks, as seen in his recent retrospective at Dangerous Curve. In this show at Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, he presents work that takes advantage of digital technology. One of the things Quinn does is hand build recursive Sculpey "tiles." Here he shows both scans of these tiles and of recursive-collage manipulations of such scans, all printed on stretched canvas.

Tim Quinn has had a long history as a nationally known Los Angeles sculptor and algorist. He has a long-standing love of recursion, which over the years he has applied to various visual material to produce a visually and conceptually stunning effect. Recently, he has had a breakthrough, producing a randomized kaleidoscope effect that defies easy understanding. Applying his own AppleScript Photoshop code to scanned images of his Sculpey objects, he achieves a global flattening of 3D space that won't flatten locally. The effect is mind boggling. We see something that looks as if it were a polymer-clay construction done in a Islamic-tiling pattern; however, the pattern, which does contain many symmetries, is too random overall to be Islamic.

Quinn's Sculpey tile work ranges from recursive hexagon clusters to more free-form configurations akin to over-the-top linoleum. They are the product of hours of kneading, rolling, and slicing. The recursive type of tiles have so many levels that their minute innermost elements require magnifying glasses to be distinguishable. Blowing up scans of such allows the viewer to see these levels. However, even the nonrecursive tiles benefit from enlargement: it allows you to see, for instance, the individual sparkles in the gold-colored Sculpey.

The actual Sculpey tiles would be interesting enough, but Quinn goes one further and subjects them to an iterative/recursive collage algorithm that he calls "image unfolding." Here he repeatedly applies his image-building algorithm to a piece of image hand-selected from the previous instance of the process. Quinn is a known algorist Quinn's work, however, is no mere science demonstration. He adds to algorithm the twist and enchantment of art. He doesn't let the algorithm take over completely, intervening at key points in the generation to exercise human artistic judgment. When he applies image unfolding to a simple black-and-white grid, it ends up a densely woven complex lace. With more complex representational images, things really ramp up. They eventually get Cuisinarted by the algorithm and extrud out into a dense, bizarre 3D lace.

Over the years, Tim's work has been seen in (among other things) the L.A. Steam Shows, the L.A. River Festivals, the Brewery's Far Bazaar, the DADA shows, FAR Parked, and Mondo Lot. He was a founding member of The Centipede Foundation, and a member of L.A. Experimental Works. He contributed the sculptural element to the collaboration ``n0time'' which toured the U.S. His work has the distinction of being in the only picture of art in Coagula Magazine's book ``Most Art Sucks.''

Tim is also an experimental musician, a founder of NEEF and The Science of Love Band, and a member of the Los Angeles Improvisers Collective. He did the experimental music for Jason Jenn's ``3volution'' that showed at Rachel Rosenthal's Espace DbD and Highways Performance Space. He also performs with his partner Kathryn Hargreaves in the popular live-art duo ArsFidelis.

Los Angeles Center for Digital Art is dedicated to the propagation of all forms of digital art, supporting local, international, emerging and established artists. They have an ongoing schedule of exhibits and competitions, and produce editions of wide format archival prints.

Opening Reception: Thursday, May 12, 2005, 7-9:00 p.m.

Los Angeles Center for Digital Art
107 West Fifth Street - Los Angeles

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