Exhibition

Klecksomancy 

by pinknoiseprojects

An Installation by Pink Noise Projects member Tyler Kline

Exhibition dates: October 7th– 30th
Opening Reception:  First Friday, October 7th 6pm – 10pm
Open weekends 2pm – 6pm or by appointment: 215.840.7239

Klecksomancy is divination summoned through the use of inkblots.  A suite of 13 cards created for the purpose of divination will be used during the opening reception to offer guidance and insight towards the intentions of viewers who choose to participate.

This invention of a divination method, and the exploration of divining is a way to celebrate and affirm creative individual and collective autonomy in an age all too often defined by isolation, inequality, and feelings of powerlessness. Interacting with undefined sacred energies through the medium of Klecksomancy, meditating upon the pregnant form of the void represented by the inkblots, and engaging in the communal activities of magic are all forms of personal reflection, community building, and mutual growth.  The pandemic taught us what we already know, that the current system of late stage global capitalism is broken and that other worlds are possible and attainable. Through solidarity and collaboration we can create speculative possible futures that are  solid and thriving from our dreams, projections, and divinations.

This exhibition is built upon playful instatiations, game play, and ambiguity endurance. Notions of trade and barter are integral to the process and reception. Transmutation of materials, chance, and shaping providence are outcomes achieved through disparate connections, embodied mythology, and courageous presentation.

The forms created for Klecksomancy search for meaning that define the Chthulucene, this new epoch we have entered, Post-Pandemic, post-Anthropocene, climate crisis informed, tentacular, multi-optic, and multi-specied. I’m interested in synchronizing with climate change through rewilding, quarantine social contracts, digital instantiation, and how our technologies have worked through our central nervous systems and etched marks in our flesh. I feel we are internalizing rapidly shifting currents of change, social upheavals, and mutationing cultural and environmental norms that are moving at velocities that momentarily transcend literal articulation. An understanding of progress through iteration, phase shifting between virtual and visceral, and the transmutation of identities informs my aesthetics and research.

The most succinct palimpsests capturing this age are acts of kindness, pictures and forms that describe movement and migration, gestures that are quick and close to thinking, and space enough to capture new forms from flickering ephemera, and evidence of cultivation of  kinship with sentient beings other than humans, particularly trees and rivers, a sentiment echoed in Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.

Games such as Dungeons and Dragons, early commodore 64 video games, and Hive Carbon  are seminal in the aesthetic choices I make; the memory of playing these games with friends and family guide my hand, lend a sense of atmosphere, and create systems to follow. The dynamics of graphic novel narratives are also influential to my voice for this body of work. The escalation of these stories from sequential art to moving images to interactive games has opened my eyes to the possibilities of cross-platform meta-narratives. Finally, all these concerns often run through numerous instantiations, mold making, metal casting, to arrive at a power object of hand held talisman proportions. Many of the sculptures are 3D prints, first modeled on a tablet in a tactile and gestural manner, often incorporating 3D scans of people important to me. The digital objects are then 3D printed, molds are created from the forms and cast in wax to ultimately exist as cast bronze, aluminum and iron. These iterations are then 3D scanned and brought into Virtual Reality, where scale is shifted, form is manipulated and the process continues.

Tyler Kline is an artist, educator, and curator living and working in Philadelphia. Kline grew up in Stone Mountain, GA, studied Architecture and Painting at the Savannah College of Art and Design and received his BA in Anthropology and Sculpture from Portland State University and a MFA in Installation and Sculpture from The Pennsylvania Academy of The Fine Arts.  Kline currently teaches sculpture, art history, and design at Rowan University and Sculpture at Pennsylvania College of Art and Design.

 He has curated shows at: New York’s Flux Factory, Atlanta’s Moving Spirits Gallery, Portland’s Martial Arts Gallery, Zeitgeist and Disjecta, as well as Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Little Berlin, Crux Space, and The University of the Arts, InLiquid.org at The Yard, and Pink Noise Projects .  A Strong believer in the power of Art to revitalize communities and bring about social change; he is fascinated by playing with the porous boundaries between painting, video, sculpture, performance, and printmaking.

 Kline’s curatorial work braids Visual Anthropology with cross disciplinary aesthetics, with an interest in emerging media, scientific cross pollination, and rapidly shifting lenses of cultural context.  Furthermore, Kline is a visual artist who has created installations in Portland, Atlanta, New York and Philadelphia, and exhibited at the Pink Noise Projects, Philly,  Rebeka Templeton Cont., Little Berlin, MASS MoCA, Vox Populi, The Delaware Art Museum, Dumbo Art Center, The Armory, NYC, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia., Washington County Museum of Fine Art, The University of The Arts, The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Portland State University, The Savannah College of Art and Design, New Bedford Art Museum, The Goethe Institute of San Francisco, and Disjecta.

 He has worked in the sphere of urban interior and exterior intervention for two decades, beginning with creating skate-parks in unused urban spaces in Atlanta, to creating a sculpture garden in the shadows of re-purposed textile mills through Little Berlin, Iglesias Gardens, and Ruth St Garden in Philadelphia. He makes immersive installations and netart, creates animated gifs as a way of exploring and constructing glitch theory, and explores the transmutation of materials by translating 3D prints into cast metal sculptures.. Kline’s own point of research within this field is to break the conceptual screen and expose the underlying, subjective, and  internal forces that are imprisoned within them by late stage capitalism as this scheme plays out in our current techno feudalistic thoughtscape.