Reception
Thursday | August 2 | 6 to 8pm
In Code is a City Center Gallery Exhibition featuring the works of Tyler Bohm. Bohm's work incorporates a unique process of digitally designing the piece, cutting it out on plexiglass with a laser cutter, and painting the resulting pieces. He then assembles the pieces and mounts them to the wall. The work is a commentary on the way organic, human activity interacts with mechanical, technological activity and how the combination of the two can sometimes be very strange.
Artist Statement
An immense and complicated web of relationships links us everyday to technologies of every imaginable sort. As one consequence of this interdependence, our technologies increasingly take on human attributes like intelligence and autonomy. This uncanny state of affairs, both intriguing and alienating, is the backdrop for the visual ideas I have been exploring.
My work shows a network of components that collectively exhibit an ambiguous, evolving intelligence. These components in the work all function in relationship to each other, like cells in an organism. In each piece are words reflecting an unbroken stream of consciousness, one that is developing an internal system of meaning by exploring linguistic structures, in particular the foundational relationship between opposites. The evolution of this consciousness and its material components reflects a hypothetical point at which the inventor loses control of their invention. The invention, like brooms in the Sorcerer's Apprentice, has taken over.
These thematic interests dovetail with the artistic process I've developed. My work is designed in a CAD program, and sent to a laser cutter that cuts the CAD file out of a sheet of plexiglas. I then paint the resulting components on the reverse side and re-assemble the work, mounting together several layers of plexiglas. This process is, like the themes explored in my work, a symptom of the increasingly strange correspondence between human and technological activity.
