Counsel Langley Visual Art

There’s these two concepts of time: One) Chronos time, which refers to seconds and minutes—it's what we use when we say the meeting begins at 11:00am or the movie starts at 7:30pm. And the other is kairos time. The definition of kairos is “a time when conditions are right for the accomplishment of a crucial action; the opportune and decisive moment.”

Kairos time is where all the characters in this series find themselves, a time of shifting into direct awareness of that which is bigger than themselves that produces solemn awe—signaling that the “conditions are right," that this is "the opportune and decisive moment."

Visually, the series takes a cue from scenic turnouts—those delightful opportunities to pull off our highways, get out of the vehicle, and walk to the very edge of our infrastructure so that we may gaze at the sheer beauty of nature as it sprawls before us. What if we move off planet—why would we not still build those opportunities? A chance to view a particularly stunning nebulae, galaxies, birthplaces of stars. The characters here are mostly in contemplative isolation, alone with the vista and their thoughts and questions. And, like the silhouettes common to folktale illustration, they are anonymous and therefore can be any of us, all of us.

Always mixing sci-fi and outer space, big universals, right in with the humble, day-to-day, the personal, and no less so with this series. It is about our end times, it is about where the sidewalk ends, the moment when we have built to the edge of our capacity. And, it is also simply the view a parent most frequently has, especially when your children are teenagers. You have built a family, you have helped children develop skills, morals, and a collection of experiences. You build all this together so that they take it to the very edge, say “what the heck is over there?” —off they go to find out. And, the hope is they are equipped to find out.

Lost highways, midnight drives, mountain passes, unknown wild lands, asphalt pathways. Answer, “Yes.” when the call to adventure comes. You can make it all the way home 20 feet at a time.

This series marks a long desired move into low-relief physicality. Playing with depth, layers, and textures in this way draws out these amazing cinematic moments, and draws of the beautiful effects of early animation techniques in which depth was created by actual layers of drawings arranged in layers.

And the title . . . I get such a kick out of subtitles, especially when they are describing sound.

Fairy tales are our collective recurring dreams/nightmares. In this series I'm rolling up images, themes, symbols, colors, numbers, all the stuff that comes up in fairy tales again and again--nature, young death, curses, silver cups, silver pools, clouded waters, pins, poison, beauty, monsters, the rule of three, tasks, challenges, seven mountain peaks . . . Bunched together into a ball of abstraction with super massive black hole gravity which collapses and explodes reborn, reforged, changed.

Or maybe it is just wandering and plucking images as if they are wildflowers and arranging them into a bouquet.

In which I am playing with time (again). A wild and useful collapsing of past-present-future in an ongoing search for glimpses of eternity. In this series I find I'm trying to do something I've always done, always wanted to do, and am somehow doing for the first time--a first step made onto this path which shines off into that mirage shimmering future. Folk tale themes, forms, and imagery appear alongside geometry, patterns, and symmetry. All the pieces in this series shift and change dramatically depending on perspective and light.

I LOVE low-tech special effects, and that's the actual driver of this series. But, also a result of the pleasure of found, naturally distressed materials--in this case old boat boards worn by salt, sand, and sea that need only a light touch here and here to give way to a story. It is the soft glow made from a back coated with fluorescent orange paint that reflects a halo for the rough wood that this series was made for.

Highway as escape hatch. Every song about driving, leaving, never coming back this way again. Drawn towards change, focus on the first Act of any story, living life with an excellent soundtrack.

Here I'm thinking about being satisfied with where you are (a.k.a, Trying To Live Where I Am). While also considering what it might look like when(if) we begin to live off-planet. In this part of the story we are still new to our new home and highly aware that everything that keeps us together is falling apart (thank you, Modest Mouse lyric). We are captivated by the outrageous beauty of the moment, over-saturated palette of manufactured skies, games with time, use of resources, playing tricks with what we know, lulling "it's okay, it's okay," but we feel the storm coming, we know it in our very cells. We are repeating mistakes we've made before we even got here.

Nights on Planet Earth is a focus on this particular, keen awareness that everything is happening all at once, i.e., tigers and happy hour exist on the same planet, Jupiter and Twinkies share a solar system. Legends talk over martinis while the four horsemen of the apocalypse flip through their ledgers.

Original inspiration came from a poem of the same name by by Campbell McGrath.

As a child I often had this certain type of dream/nightmare of driving down an outrageously long, straight, and narrow road always toward distant, looming mountains. While on every side earth would be collapsing and quaking, or surging waters flooding, massive fires raging, and sometimes, when I was lucky, morning would come, brilliant and full of color.

The entirety of my direct experience with AM radio has occurred at night, in a car, on a highway.  During one of these drives I was told, while listening to a man explain how he copes with his ability to read minds, that AM radio signals behave differently during daytime and nighttime.

The science of AM radio functioning struck me as somehow poignant.  AM radio crouches low and weak during the glare of day, but at night unfolds humble wings and reaches across great distances.  From Wiki:

During the day, AM signals travel by groundwave, diffracting around the curve of the earth over a distance up to a few hundred miles (or kilometers) from the signal transmitter. However, after sunset, changes in the ionosphere cause AM signals to travel by skywave, enabling AM radio stations to be heard much farther from their point of origin than is normal during the day.

I am also moved by this:

AM radio signals can be severely disrupted in large urban centres by metal structures, tall buildings and sources of radio frequency interference (RFI) and electrical noise, such as electrical motors, fluorescent lights, or lightning.  Wiki.

AM radio is driving through the middle of nowhere in the dark listening to the fringes of human endeavor being put forth with a no gloss earnestness and meandering passion.  We use AM waves to project into the clear, dark everywhere/anywhere our most basic, contentious, awkward human endeavors–extreme partisan politics, religion, the supernatural, ufos, as well as, a few songs that you will never hear again anywhere else.

The oddly hollow tone of AM radio further adds a layer of remoteness that relates to the cold, dark hum of deep space, with its vast distances between stars, planets, galaxies.

Oh, I also discovered that I happen to share a birthday with AM radio:

AM radio began with the first, experimental broadcast on [December 24th] of 1906 by Canadian experimenter Reginald Fessenden, and was used for small-scale voice and music broadcasts up until World War I.

Underlying structure affects what is visible. This series is also a reaction to stunning satellite imagery of plant cultivation on a massive scale. There is a beauty and strangeness that results from something natural being placed into a grid. Grids seem to be very useful to us humans.

I am attracted to the scientific source of this series’ title, but am openly only borrowing the mood of the term rather than its precise technical definitions (for one thing I don't even fully grasp those meanings, although I am trying). In the end, these are called Strange Attractors because the words apply directly. These pieces are odd, verging on alien, and magnetically attractive--the lustrous textures immediately enticing, causing fingers to twitch with the impulse to touch.

After years of layering two opposing approaches: One a collection of turbulent techniques--dripping, pours, splatters to create effective representations of natural elements. The other controlled--lines, concentric circles, grids and repetitive dots drawn with pen and ink, architects' tools, templates and compasses reflecting structures and infrastructures that we build. I became aware of what I was doing, that I was trying in each piece to find a balance between order and chaos. I was doing a pretty messy job of both, so to learn more about each approach I took some time to stop, to distill, separate and place these two approaches in juxtaposition.

The result was this series. On one side, using limited palettes--sometimes monochromatic--a field of controlled forms; clean and precise, emphasizing differences in surface textures to pick out forms, lines and fields of dots. Evidence that tools were manipulated left readily apparent. On the other side, paint is allowed to follow its natural tendencies in response to gravity and physics; evidence of my influence on the medium disappearing to a minimum.

Looking at them side-by-side I came to understand both at a deeper level. One surprising discovery was that the approach I thought of as "chaotic" was actually the more ordered of the two, following a clear and consistent set of rules, just like waves, beaches, plants, clouds, etc. While my so-called controlled tool use was more often arbitrary and riddled with hiccups and human error.