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Tynan Kerr 

Numbers Pushers 

Hair and Nails Gallery 

Bullet Point Thoughts That Wax Poetic by Katelyn Farstad 

 

•Our bodies are made of stars- I’ve heard it both written and said 

•Compositional balance is great 

•Line 

•Color – do we really need to even say more? 

•Repeated shapes (horseshoe) 

•Surreal, dream like, yet anal (someone telling you a dream, remembering a dream but someone that is actually good at those things because usually those things are boring) 

•A ladder with missing rungs  (at what place would it matter, or be better or worse, for a rung of a ladder to be missing? The bottom? The middle? The top? How does this correlate to consciousness?)  Fear of Success? Fear of Failure?

•Not sure about the heads but I am glad they are there 

•Twins: you assume they either like each other or that they have evil, contrarian thoughts and actions towards their cosmic mirrors 

•Dead stare; hard to place emotional content on any of the faces  

•One on the floor = dead 

•Provisionally completed in comparison to the hung works on the wall which is good for the overall conversations between the pieces 

•No eyes (lack of clear vision, minded towards experimentation more than in the past that I have seen Ty Kerr’s work exhibited)

•The color of the heads- more intense hue but somehow less interesting ultimately than the palettes constructed in the paintings on wax and on paper. I like the more pastel or muted color palettes that are still very exploratory and complimentary 

•Yellow long nose looking out window figure : “I cannot tell a lie “ “I’m a real boy!” How to derive fact or fiction from these psychic landscapes…. What is truth but what you happen to believe? 

•Fountain room – sound of bubbling water- ASMR experience of total pleasure 

•Punk fountain in back room  

•The painting that faces you when you enter the gallery combines all aspects of material exploration and I like it the most because it is not figurative

•Somehow the fountain painting in the back room is figurative because it implies a verb or something whereas the ladder painting is just all broken glass and rose petals if you catch my drift 

•It is the ladder with fucked up rungs 

•And the patterning doesn’t seem decorative

•It seems more like inherent like somehow more woven in or

•It makes me feel a feeling similar to flossing (love thinking about flossing) 

•Then I noticed that a ghost barely makes its train 

•The thought of a character in one painting: “Though I know I wear three separate faces, they all look the same to you.” 

•I digress, trauma might be cosmically organizing the feeling of being constantly overwhelmed 

•Confident dance moves at a wedding make everyone feel good 

•To cleanse, you move on or make ornamental a necessary substance to life

•Lighting a fire under ones own ass just to feel warm is perfectly ok 

•Making works to encourage 

•Patterning: is it really forced fun? No I think its just plain fun. 

•Batteries though at times full of perfect potential 

•Also corrode and provide defunct 

•Title # 20 : “Ancient Battery Technologies Transmit Radio Signal Sine Waves Comprised of Meditations, Dream Journal Entries and Stoned Ramblings, Transmissions From An Untethered State of Consciousness Whose Meandering Narratives Flow Whether or Not Meaning Or Truth Is To Be Found Within Then. It is Difficult To Know How It Happens and When.” 

•This title rules very hard and I feel like you can just read that title and derive a general synthesis of all of the interests present in this show

•Art making as self healing 

•Inventing your own tools and using them

•Display of personal style and also attempt at dissolution of this style 

•Death the looming threat that always calls and hangs up or just stays on the line and breathes heavily 

•Optimism and pessimism are the same thing just like opposites 

•Existential gratitude and genuine interest in creating new worlds 

•What it is, VS what it could be (anything at all or anything else at all) 

•Flirting with POP but waxing more personal 

•Total attempt at leaving narrative structure of character based compositions

• This show pushes that exploration with having a lot of different ideas and trying to get them to all get along 

•The basement is like cool psy-fi subconscious speak easy vibe  “after dinner let’s read poetry and not be ironic about it” 

•Art is incredible 

•This show makes me feel both sleepy and rested; the beginning and the end but not exactly the middle 

•A hollow meatloaf 

•A square banana 

•A surprise party you throw yourself, and I gotta tell you, I respect you for that 

Katelyn Farstad is an artist and musician living and working in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Farstad drums in Larry Wish and His Guys and plays solo music under the moniker Itch Princess.

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“The way a potato can see is that it can’t see because it lives in the dark without light, and there can’t be dark without light, so it lives in the dark without the dark.  Parts of it’s whole organism reach out with leaves to seek the light, transmitting information which must also infer light and darkness to the potato itself, the part left always beneath the ground.  What must they think about down there without contrast?

When I was a kid I wanted to be a potato, because I could not understand what it looked like underground when one was underground.  It was mysterious to me, and potatoes were imbued with that same mystery.  There used to be a underground library in uptown, and when I heard about this as a child, before the first time I went I imagined windows down there looking out into the dirt, out into the distance of the dirt, all the way to the dirt horizon, that if you squinted right you could be convinced you saw even just beyond the dirt horizon, the way only a potato could see.

Sometimes I think about making underground windows, and pressing different colors of stratified earth, gravel, roots and trash, some skeleton or another against the glass. I don’t always want to make these, probably not often enough. The same problems emerge, how would one light it?”

-Tynan Kerr

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Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods,

Jeroen Peeters & Josef Wouters

Projecting [Space]

Reinbeckhallen/HAU, Berlin

October 7, 2018

by Sean Smuda

 

It takes an hour and four changes to get here, through suburbs, forests, and industrial zones so designed that a giant hand arranging toy trains is always implied. I practice German for “do you have an extra ticket” as I have been assured in a very German box office way that the waiting list is full and I “for sure will not get in”. Erasmus, a Finn, grants my entrance gratis with three minutes to go. Tic scanned and wrist banded, I walk the planks to a riverfront park in front of Reinbeck’s defunct thread factory.

 

Projecting [Space] starts like Burning Man, but in a grassy field. Silver panted bright colored tech hippies drape clothes over a car with flashing hazards. They raise an antenna, lay on the roof, and unpack in a dusk not quite cold enough to see breath. Harsh light blinds and highlights the deer fenced, soccer sized field giving it a refugee camp vibe (apparently the fence repels vagrants). Pre-recorded crickets, crows, and ambient synths create a quasi-native peace for we one-hundred or so audience members who mill towards scenes and sounds broadcast from trees and grounds. Techno-hippies aside, other figures lay scattered and blanketed, sometimes consoled by one another. Two BMX’ers and their blue-toothed Reggae circle us, adding to the mix as a man in oil-black pants is lifted two stories on a forklift, legs spread, arms akimbo, imposing reign. When he comes down, he lays on the machine’s forks like a tusk hammock, then leads it tamely across the periphery. A very pregnant African in a Batman cap walks to the other side and sits under a speakered tree above a beach. She rounds the scene, trance-like, and calls out an audience/performer dichotomy: is she, or isn’t she? I sway hard in my bright red down shell and one-legged tree stance and wonder if others also wonder and/or go with it. They stare and I think of structure, distance, and spiritual economy, in short: all things German. A small Bobcat shovel tractor enters the middle of the field and slowly spins, carving dirt circles. Eventually, a performer stares and telepathically leads it away. The BMX’ers fetch an inflatable boat and bring it across the field as soprano wails and piano arpeggios from “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” swell with a Reggae and techno remix. Every performer has their own musical signature and they blend as we are led out of the park to the factory.

 

What follows is a guided union of hands cradling, emitting, and receiving energies throughout and including the audience. Monastic approaches train eyes and bodies like four-dimensional chess pieces whose hierarchies re-cycle in large industrial rooms of three-story bunk bed bleacher shelves. Detritus art hangs next to industrial switches and precedes increasing sonic accelerations and volumes in which performers grapple with invisible obstacles, indoor parachuting, and long discursive conversations about becoming smoke. In the finale, a tribal dance with stand-up bass spills us unplugged over bodies dashing the way to a plaza outside. Here we are teased and engulfed by pink and grey fire bombs and pit. Here we map out projections, dance on concrete, write space with eyes, blur cast, crew, and audience.

 

Sean Smuda is making new things. www.seansmuda.com