Tim Tate

Maybe She Dreams Of Rivers

18 x 24 x 4
Cast Glass, Video

 
Tim Tate_Maybe She Dreams Of Rivers

 

Bellows Interrupted

18 x 24 x 4
Wood, Video

 
Tim Tate.Bellows In Black Frame
 

The Debut

18 x 14 x 3
Cast PolyVitro, Glass, Video

 
Tim Tate.The Debut Poly
 

She Goes Walking After Midnight

18 x 14 x 2
Cast Glass, Video

 
Tim Tate.Walking After Midnight
 

On The Calm Black Waters Where The Stars Are Sleeping

18 x 24 x 4
Cast Polyvitro, Video

 
Tim Tate.On the calm black water where the stars are sleeping
 

The Healing Polyopticon

Cast PolyVitro, Glass, Video
 

 
Tim Tate.Healing Polyopticon
This 5 ft wide installation consists of 16 video pieces in varying sizes of cast black frames. Each video is in the form of an eye blinking; each eye different. There is a glass lens covering each video, making it appear as an an eye. Surrounding this cluster of 16 video frames are cast black roses and chrysanthemums which loosely fills out the 5ft wide circle . Black roses for memory, chrysanthemums for eternal life.

30 years ago, I received a terminal diagnosis. To keep my sanity and health, I imagined then that there were portals from above, each with someone who would watch over me to keep me safe. These were people that I had known and who had touched my life in some way.

Family members, old friends, a beloved teacher, my old camp counselor….people who had effected my life in a positive way. They would guard over me… keeping me from passing over, making me safe; imbuing me with self healing energy.

This is the first chance I have had to ever had to make a physical representation of this healing manifestation. Anyone who steps in front of it can imagine their own loved ones watching over them. I believe that anyone standing in front of this will feel that healing energy emanating from this work. Come stand in front of it and see for yourself.
 

Artist’s Statement

I see my pieces as self-contained video installations. Blending a traditional craft with new media technology gives me the framework in which I fit my artistic narrative. Contemporary, yet with the aesthetic of Victorian techno-fetishism. Revelation — and in some cases self-revelation — is the underlying theme of my electronic reliquaries and baroque cast frames.

My interactive pieces can be seen as disturbing because the images that stare back from the video screen prompts a variety of responses: amusement, discomfort, embarrassment, something akin to the feeling you have when someone catches you looking at your own reflection in a store window as you walk by.

But the important revelations here are in the viewer’s response to my hybrid art form and its conceptual nature. I try to bare everything — the guts of my materials and my inner thoughts — in deceptively simple narrative videos set into specimen jars or ultra-Victorian cast glass picture frames. Nothing is random, all elements are thought out.

To me, these works are phylacteries of sorts, the transparent reliquaries in which bits of saints’ bones or hair — relics — are displayed. In many cultures and religions, relics are believed to have healing powers. My relics are temporal, sounds and moving images formally enshrined, encapsulating experiences like cultural specimens. And perhaps, to the contemporary soul, they are no less reliquaries than those containing the bones of a saint.

With technology rapidly changing the way we perceive art, the current day contemporary landscape closely mirrors Victorian times in the arts. We marvel at and invent bridges between past and present in an effort to define our time and make sense of this highly transitory moment in artistic history.

Tim Tate is Co-Founder of the Washington Glass School and Studio. Tim’s work is in the permanent collections of a number of museums, including the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and the Mint Museum. He was the subject of several articles in American Style, American Craft, and Sculpture magazines, as well as the Washington Post and Times newspaper reviews. He was also the 2010 recipient of the $35,000 Virginia Groot Foundation award for sculpture.

Tim taught in Istanbul in August 2007 and at Penland School on several occasions. In 2009 he received an award from the Museum of American Glass in New Jersey as one of the “Rising Stars of the 21st Century.” He received his Fulbright Award from Sunderland University in England in 2012. He is also the founder of “Glass Secessionism.” Tim shows his work at numerous international art fairs, such as ArtBasel Switzerland, Art Miami, SOFA and Frieze, London. TimTateSculpture.com

Editors’ Notes (Posit 5)

 

Welcome to Posit 5!

In this issue we are proud to feature literary and visual work by many rising, as well as gloriously risen, stars. As ever, we offer a range of literary aesthetics and approaches, from excerpted book-length projects by Anne Waldman and Pamela Lawton, Jane Lewty, and Deborah Poe, to short fiction by Luke Whisnant. This issue also showcases the poetic potential of the long prose line, put to innovative and distinctive use by Stephanie Anderson, Rob Cook, Kristina Marie Darling, Vanessa Couto Johnson, Bobbi Lurie, and Zach Savich.

We hope you enjoy:

Stephanie Anderson’s delightfully surreal and surprising Ditties, in which “everyone sits in the yo-yo park, staring at the buds,” and we are playfully invited to “look up the appendix” but warned not to “ride in the wrong direction”;

Marcia Arrieta’s gossamer constructions, at once contemplative, startling, and forlorn, in which “everything is dreadfully calm,” “deer come and graze on [her] bed,” and the narrator “often feel like an orphan”;

Rob Cook’s somber, foreboding poems in which he informs us of “the screams where I went / looking / for the clothes / my mother wore”;

Kristina Marie Darling’s wittily slant re-imaginings of nostalgic iconographies of femininity, charting their magical courses “from Iceland to Finland to anxious”;

Vanessa Couto Johnson’s wise wordplay delivered via statements that “think with the delicate,” awakening us to the mystery and ambiguity of our own existence, in which “the heart is not a pound but an apothecary dispensing needs”;

Jane Lewty’s “Spatio-Temporal [Re]Mix” of aural and visual referents amalgamated with precision and care into poems of musicality and provocative design, resonant with “a strange elation,/the skitter guilt of/achievement”;

Bobbi Lurie’s dense and powerful evocations of strength in the face of pain, shunning what is “fake as plastic shrubs” to reveal “how much the pursued is pursuant upon/a clause in the material fabric of a lie” with “the skill to slice whatever needs to”;

Nils Michals’ prose poems, teasing us with the contents of boxes: “an entire forest, petrified white, whereby the occasional breeze stirs the crowns” and something “unclaimed . . . is gifted to the Church in the name of a holy work that shall be unnamed”;

Deborah Poe’s quiet, serene “prouns:” elegant transformations of space to states of being we “don’t have to understand” although we are led to consider “[w]hat is lost when you ask why,” and assured that we “don’t have to connect dirt to language, But the histories cave right there”;

Zach Savich’s spare, starkly simple nuggets of imagist magic, demonstrating that “the things I like are the things that happen,” in other words, why “pleasure educates”;

Anne Waldman and Pamela Lawton’s feminist appropriation of classical oral tradition in which “women’s work is never shunned” and “the skies [keep] circling the/liberated hearth” where the female body is sung by its self and she/we can feel genuinely “welcome to the symposium”;

and Luke Whisnant’s post-apocalyptic flash fiction about a mandolin virtuoso in whose “music [resides] the anguished song of a headless doll and the rubato stagger of a cripple’s broken crutch.”

Thank you for reading!
Susan Lewis and Bernd Sauermann

positInkSpash131210.small

Welcome to the visual art of Posit 5!

Made from found and fabricated objects, Mari Andrews’ sculptures delicately dance the line between nature and nurture, form and object. Each piece suggests a multitude of possible references. At once open-ended and concrete, her works are bits of sculptural poetry.

Kevin Brisco’s series “Build” presents a world of young men at work with muscular energy, both literally and imagistically. The raw materials that his images are painted on – wood, tape, and sheetrock – interact with the subject matter in a way that comments on the process and the product of a creative life.

The fact that Marcus Leatherdale uses the English colonial name for the Indian sub-continent, “Bharat,” in the title of this stunning photographic essay gives more than a clue as to its intent. This reference to India’s past jives perfectly with these elegant and haunting portraits of his friends and neighbors, imbued as they are with such a feeling of timeless nostalgia.

Oriane Stender’s work plays with the imagery and the objects of our material world. Using US currency and found paper, she sews, weaves, and paints these sly commentaries on the cultural interplay of commerce and art, image and meaning.

And finally, the video artworks by Tim Tate, elegantly framed in handmade glass, conjure the bits and pieces of half-remembered dreams. Their inhabitants share a moment with us and then, poof — they’re gone.

I hope you enjoy!
Melissa Stern