Tyler Dylan Lotz

These recent sculptures are about abstraction, a longing for wilderness, and my failed attempts at conjuring personal experiences I have had in the landscape throughout my life. Influenced by both natural and mediated landscapes, these pieces can elicit a single place and time or an amalgam of time, experiences and desires. Thus the forms and surfaces are fragmented and residual, while simultaneously evidential and illusive. I use physical attributes of ceramic glaze like color, the range of surface between mattness and gloss, and the range between translucency and opacity, coupled with a variety of application techniques to create a surface that alters our perception of the angular and organic ceramic forms. Incorporating both casting and hand forming techniques, the sculptures have the sensibility of synthetic, fabricated and built objects and environments. 

These recent sculptures are about abstraction, a longing for wilderness, and my failed attempts at conjuring personal experiences I have had in the landscape throughout my life. Influenced by both natural and mediated landscapes, these pieces can elicit a single place and time or an amalgam of time, experiences and desires. Thus the forms and surfaces are fragmented and residual, while simultaneously evidential and illusive. I use physical attributes of ceramic glaze like color, the range of surface between mattness and gloss, and the range between translucency and opacity, coupled with a variety of application techniques to create a surface that alters our perception of the angular and organic ceramic forms. Incorporating both casting and hand forming techniques, the sculptures have the sensibility of synthetic, fabricated and built objects and environments. 

Historically, man’s relationship with nature has been one of intervention, marked by the human drive to tame its wildness, use its resources and shape it in its own image.  My sculpture is a speculative response to the many ways in which we remake nature to suit our own purposes.  It questions the assumption that “the artificial” could be an acceptable stand-in for “the real” in regards to human interaction with our natural world.  This is examined through a multi-faceted lens that includes ideas like a longing for wilderness and my concern for the developing global environmental emergency.   

The works from the exhibition Future Vestiges on one level address the metaphorical potential of traces or residue.   What might these residua say about their original state when removed and presented without their whole.  It also looks at the potential for things once deemed as indispensable to evolve to the point of being no longer necessary.    

The Moraines series began as a speculation about what might be left behind when the next ice age recedes.  The resulting masses of form and color are the residue, the tangled remains of a world where things are made and where things just occur.  They are deposits of human tangibles and intangibles, our objects and our ideas.  These accumulations of positives and negatives hold at once our best and worst intentions.     

New works, including the Patch series and others, consider the absurd, but often requisite concept of changing our environment to suit our own needs and desires.  On one level, this work is influenced by the sense of longing I have to be among the wild mountains and streams of my childhood, while I continue to live in the flat, extremely mediated landscape of agricultural central Illinois.  The work also looks at man’s attempts to change our worsening environmental emergency through geo-engineering rather than reducing the activities that have caused it.