Tyler Kline

Bio: 

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. 

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 and InLiquid.org. 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 and scientific cross pollination. Furthermore, Kline is a visual artist who has created installations in Portland, Atlanta, New York and Philadelphia, and exhibited at the 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 Univeristy, 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 in Philadelphia. He makes immersive installations and netart, and creates animated gifs as a way of exploring and constructing glitch theory. 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. 

Statement:

My work is concentrated on carving out forms that define the Chthulucene, this new epoch we have entered, Post-Pandemic, post-Anthropocene, tentacular, multi-optic, and multi-specied. I’m interested in quarantine social contracts, digital instantiation, 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 mutation cultural norms that are moving at velocities that momentarily transcend literal articulation. Acts of kindness, pictures and forms work best now, gestures that are quick and close to thinking, and space enough to capture new forms from flickering ephemera. 

These sculptures serve multiple purposes: avatars, fetishes, shrines, game pieces, exploration of hyperbolic form, and speculation on non-anthropocentric life forms. I am extremely influenced by collaboration, composting and gardening, and search for 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. 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. 

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. 

Future Goals consist of creating mobile temples, sites of divination, and accumulation of photosynthesised energies in the form of Viridian Quantum Loop Vessels. I need to build space ships.