Maybe She Dreams Of Rivers
18 x 24 x 4
Cast Glass, Video
Bellows Interrupted
18 x 24 x 4
Wood, Video
The Debut
18 x 14 x 3
Cast PolyVitro, Glass, Video
She Goes Walking After Midnight
18 x 14 x 2
Cast Glass, Video
On The Calm Black Waters Where The Stars Are Sleeping
18 x 24 x 4
Cast Polyvitro, Video
The Healing Polyopticon
Cast PolyVitro, Glass, Video
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.
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 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