Telos-scope

The Bon Fire Is Out

2012-01-29T17:52:00.000-08:00

"They say the classics never go out of style, but they do... they do. Somehow baby, I never thought we'd do, too." - Refused

Paul Boshears called me a romantic for wanting to let the 'bonfire' fade over the two days of the event., as opposed to rebuilding it the second day. I told him that I was not being romantic, because there is nothing romantic about fading away.
I can't say who was right, but this dead art is definitely making me feel like a sap...

Bon Fire

2012-01-28T12:33:00.000-08:00

Here are some of the best shots from my interactive performance thig-a-ma-gig I did for Off The Edge.

A big thanks to Paul Boshears and Lauri Stallings for the opportunity, and to the guys and gals from Back On My Feet for their assistance.

I'll post more when the fire has extinguished...

(Click pic to see larger)

In the beginning

Getting things going, a little interaction

Pretty much going full steam ahead

Everyone is gone, but the fire blazes on...

A Milky Way

2012-01-18T11:05:00.000-08:00

Images of a new work for Work In White, a show I will be in at CherryLion Studios in Atlanta, on January 28.
http://www.facebook.com/events/301396043239767/

A Milky Way Mixed media, © Casey Lynch (2012)

Click on the image to see it larger.

Detail shot of A Milky Way ©Casey Lynch (2012)

Glow stick shipment arrived!

2012-01-17T07:37:00.000-08:00

I just got my shipment of glow sticks for my participatory piece for Off The Edge in Atlanta's Woodruff Park. As always, a few cracked in transit, so here is a small "fire" made from them. The official work will be called "Bon Fire," and will have a small group of people creating an artificial bon fire from orange, yellow, and red glow sticks. There will be a circle of about 5000 glow sticks activated during the event. I'm hoping to also have some audience participation...

More Glow experiments

2011-09-21T18:51:00.000-07:00

Not Yet Titled (2011)

Living Room （2011）

Here are a few photos of more work with the glow sticks. I'm figuring out how to photograph them a little better, the lighting is tricky though, and not fully accurate to real life. The pic below is closer to what it is really like.

New "Sculpture"

2011-09-18T19:39:00.000-07:00

Here is another piece I've been working on - it was really nice to see something go from Sketch-Up, to hand-drawn, back to sketch-up, then into Photoshop. Hopefully it will go into the real world some day soon. (If you have a couple hundred and a big yard, hit me up. wink wink ;-) I want to paint the inside with glow paint, then let it do its thing, but if I ever get to build it and the glow isn't strong enough, I'm gonna do car neon and solar panels. (actually i think the neon and solar panel would be less expensive) This image has it situated on the median of my hometown's Broadway.

2011-09-09T10:44:00.000-07:00

More fun in the studio I wanted to share. It is a gif, so you need to click on it to see the animation

More Studio Play - Make It Glow On 'Em

2011-08-15T10:26:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed that in my ongoing investigation of artificial light I have developed a relationship with the old 'outer glow' Photoshop effect. It's just so...
Anyways, stemming from that practice, I have begun to experiment with glow sticks, as they exist IRL, yet possess that outer glow associated with fluorescence. They are quite the ball of metaphor when you think about light as an analogy for truth. They are human engineered, user activated, temporary, come in many colors; the list can go on.
These are some very basic, preliminary sketches. Eventually, I want to actually make some 'permanent' versions to be shown in a gallery or show; maybe some '2-D' and some '3-D'. They would be designed beforehand, activated and constructed the day of the show (glued together on panels I suppose), then left to fade away over the course of the show, leaving only the lifeless mass as artifact.
Besides a metaphor for truth or enlightenment, I also sort of see this as a commentary on the popularization of ephemeral art like performance and relational aesthetics versus the imperative for salable goods in the gallery.

For the most part, these are not Photoshopped, i.e., no special filters or effects have been used to alter the images, just a little cropping and minimal color correction.
The first five were taken in total darkness. All are arranged on white illustration board, 20"x30".

The one below was taken in dim lighting.

The one below was taken the next day, in full light, after the chemical reaction that causes the glow had run its course.

Playing around with drawing and installation

2011-07-31T17:27:00.000-07:00

Here are some shots from this past weekend when I hung a few drawings at SCAD for Martha Wittington's ArtMerge with MocaGA. I had fun actually making installation for once, even if it was short-lived. There were also some glow-sticks on the ground, but I cropped them out of the photos - I didn't like them in hindsight. I used the color DVD from my old piece "Levitas", and projected it from outside of the gallery onto the frosted glass, which left an amazing color haze over the drawing. If the angles/perspective looks off, the installation is in a weird 'flat-iron' shaped corner of the space.

Detail of the drawing's reflection back over the projection - talk about Meta-Platonics

A couple more drawings

2011-06-29T11:09:00.000-07:00

Another sampling. I'm not sure if Bivouac is done, but I am definitely stumped by it for now. Also, Slope is tentatively titled, I'm also thinking Slope Floats, but whatever, probably not.

Bivouac sharpie on paper, 50"x38" (2011)

Slope ink and color pencil on paper 14x17 (2011)

What? I thought I quit making Art!

2011-05-18T17:24:00.000-07:00

New drawings - YAY!

I have been thinking a good deal lately about our relationship to the screen, and how it has changed over time. I don't have the concept clear yet, but it as something to do with our obsession with the glowing screen, possibly as a surrogate for the comfort and wonderment caused by fire. Fire is a multifaceted entity that could be thought of as natural or artificial, depending on how it was ignited. In that sense, I see these drawings as an extension of my installation work that focuses on the implications of human-initiated (artificial) light sources.

currently untitled ink and color pencil on parchment, 14x17 (2011)

currently untitled ink and color pencil on paper, 18x24 (2011)

Work from the RISD Graduate Thesis Show 2009

2009-06-03T06:48:00.001-07:00

A big thank you to all my friends and family who supported me over the past two years (and before).

2009-04-02T14:19:00.000-07:00

Here is my latest sculptural offering. I'm not quite sure what is going on, but I know I'm experimenting with surface and movement in a way I'm not used to. Right now its stuck somewhere in a [(Pollack/Reinhardt/Rauschenburg) + (something else)/ water droplets] place, which isn't all bad, but not really my intention. I am still dealing with ideas of nothingness, phenomenology, and physics though - presence/absence, light/dark, levitation, gravity, electrons and photons, etc. Definitely gonna need more investigation.

Long time, No update

2009-03-06T05:07:00.000-08:00

Its been quite some time since my last update. Im going to be in a group show in a few weeks in Newark, NJ at Gallery Aferro called Tabula Rasa. It opens March 21.

I will also be in a group show in New Haven, CT at a place called Creative Arts Workshop, opening Apri 10th. It is called Sky's the Limit: Built, Unbuilt, or Just Imagined. It is their annual juried show, and was juried by Janet Echelman, an amazing artist who a Fellow at Harvard.

In other news, I have been nominated for an International Sculpture Center's (Sculpture magazine) 2009 Outstanding Student Acheivement In Contemporary Sculpture Award. I am still far from receiving the actual award, but the nomination by my school's faculty is quite nice. Let's Hope for the best.

More new work

2008-10-13T12:20:00.000-07:00

Here is a piece I just completed. Its called Asymptote, in reference to a limiting line that is never reached, but is infinitely approached. I feel like it is a return to a mode of working I was heading towards, but kind of veered away from when I came to grad school and attempted to try new things.
Essentially it is two curved walls that recede back towards a column of extremely bright lights. The pic is low res and taken with my phone, but i really think its a cool pic none the less - although in real life, the light is difficult to look at, the pic exaggerates the brightness of it. Better documentation will be on my website soon.

Something i've been thinkning about

2008-07-24T12:29:00.000-07:00

There is an inherent quality of digital media that lends itself to elaboration on the idea of abstraction, especially Minimalism, as a practice. It allows for an ability to further the dialogue about the reduction of form, action and idea to their most basic elements, pure information, which approaches the point most near non-existence; a space similar to that of traditional (written) language.
I am pondering the similarity to the storage of information in the brain, as well as the dissipation of information in the brain. On the same note, but on a macro scale, there seems to be a parallel to information sent as wave-from (radio, light, etc.) and its atrophy as it traverses space away from Earth (or any other source.)
What function do the rate of demise and the ability to decode/translate/recycle have on a work of art's (or anything's) value? Is the value of a vehicle for communication married to its ability to be translated?

Work in progress

2008-07-13T14:04:00.000-07:00

Here is a work in progress that i am pretty excited about: I am videoing myself practicing (Zen)meditation for 30 minutes a day. The video (digital) is then transferred to an external harddrive for storage. The harddrive, with the video stored on it, is the final piece. I am using a Lacie brand designer (Niel Poulton) harddrive for its minimalist aesthetic. One of the things i am thinking about is the transformation of an action’s (or anything's) meaning when processed to a hyper-minimal state of existence. The use of Zen is interesting in that it is one of the major influences on minimalism to begin with, (i.e. John Cage), and still quoted persistently in minimalist design. To reduce a reductive process is to aim for a new nearness to Nothing. The image is of the harddrive (currently on a pedestal - this may be revised.) (As a sidenote, my benchmarks are measured in space (gigabytes), instead of time, and are 100GB, 250GB, and 500GB.)

Outliers in the Data

2008-06-23T07:56:00.000-07:00

Here are images from a project I finished in the spring, where i painted different trees a solid color. I was thinking about creating kind of abnormalities in nature, exceptions to the rule. I was also trying to confuse the ideas of order and chaos, in that the trees, once ordered (by becoming a uniform color) would make apparent the previous order that was hidden in the uniform chaos of the forest. Although for me the "real art" is the actual painted tree in the woods, where one may only happen upon it by chance, I chose to document them in a fashion that is reminiscent of Bigfoot/Sasquatch photos, in that the subject is not always in focus, or is not the focal point of the photograph.

New Blog

2008-06-12T13:01:00.000-07:00

This is the new blog i have started to keep people updated on my work, and to kind of "journalize" some of my thought process. Stay tuned...