Tyler Kline
Drilling for water to feed the fountain
gesso ink transfer and oil on board, 11x11, 2024
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 in the Painting Department of Tyler School of Art at Temple University, as well as being a collective member of Pink Noise Projects in the 319 building in Philadelphia.
"Place, becoming, belonging, movement, migration in a hyper-individualized world is disorienting. The language of cartography is a universal form, maps are both poetic and pragmatic, containing the palimpsest of our shared realities, personal yearnings, and formulation of loci.
I am using Ai, specifically a Midjourney Bot#9282; Why Ai? I am consciously traveling straight into the uncanny valley in order to commune with an entity that is explosively futuristic, a decision that has elicited recoil and disgust. My view is that this entity has been telling us how to move through space via cloud mapping systems, what to listen to via systems like Spotify, and curated our viewing experience through the hive mind of the internet for decades; I attempt to make this predicament as collaborative as possible and use a system of pattern recognition greater than myself to build an aesthetic lexicon of place in a distributed age.
Exploring the ever-fluid and constantly evolving relationship between place, movement, identity, and migration through the lens of parabolic design, soft-machine learning, cartography and sacred geometry, this body of work is rooted in remembrance of place. Maps - symbols of fixed borders and defined space - become a malleable form, reshaped through memory, dream, omission, embellishments, gerrymandering, Ai iterations, and ideographic notation."
