The Crisp-Ellert Art Museum and Flagler College welcome artist Timothy Stanley, whose multidisciplinary practice includes sculpture and experimental fiction alongside digital and interactive components.
Stanley’s exhibition, entitled “Ursula,” will be on view from Jan. 20 through Feb. 22 and will feature selections from his ongoing sculptural project. The exhibition will also feature a site-specific installation entitled “Kathleen’s Game.” Stanley will host a walkthrough of the exhibition on Thursday, Jan. 19, at 5 p.m., followed by an opening reception until 7 p.m. CEAM will be open on Friday, Feb. 4, for First Friday Art Walk, from 5 p.m. until 9 p.m.
“Ursula,” the title of Stanley’s exhibition and sculpture practice, is also a lens through which he explores how people can experience narrative differently and whether stories can be communicated abstractly.
Both the “Ursula” sculptures and “Kathleen’s Game” arise from Stanley's deeper approach to the concept of time in relation to the artistic process. His exhibition is rhizomatic, like a plant stem expanding its shoots in a non-linear network, connecting new points to new points.
His “Ursula” sculpture studies utilize a variety of materials— from wood, wire, tape, and glue to foam and shellac. They are not a collection of finished sculptures but in-process studies for a larger, hypothetical work. Aiming to tell an abstract, three-dimensional story through the experience of these studies, Stanley explores how narrative can be structured as an object or even as a human body.
“Kathleen's Game” is a multimodal project that Stanley began at the start of the pandemic in 2020. Written in a combination of prose, C# script, and user posts from online game communities, “Kathleen's Game” is a development log (devlog) for a mobile video game about time. It is inspired by conversations on the subject of time between the artist and his friend Kathleen, who has lived her entire adult life with brain cancer.
This multimodal project is a site-specific installation based on the “devlog.” It functions as an art gallery, a reading room, and a video game cafe. Museum-goers are encouraged to engage with the space and to use the main table as a work desk or gaming space.
The installation features a collaborative work by Stanley and Dorin Cucicov, an artist and computer scientist from Chișinău, Moldova. The piece is a digital quadriptych of animated rhizome terrains that have been programmed to grow and shrink based on code inspired by the video games Stanley’s narrator explores. The artwork asks: is it possible to experience another person’s sense of time by developing a deep, empathic connection to them?
By uniting these two projects together, Stanley meditates on art’s ability to communicate a story abstractly by creating what he calls "a network of aesthetic experiences."
