Dylan Lynch, Falling Over, 2013. Courtesy of the artist and The Still House Group, Brooklyn.

December 10, 2013
Art
Culture

DYLAN LYNCH

For his first piece as a contributing member of Brooklyn’s The Still House Group, Dylan Lynch proposed covering an entire bathroom in duct tape, including the inside of the toilet, without impairing the functionality of the space. Still House, an “emerging arts organization” that nurtures the career of young artists, many of whom chose not to attend art school, proved to be an excellent incubator for Lynch’s bold but untested ideas.

The lauded installation, completed as part of Still House’s first group show in 2008, was a revelation for Lynch. “After one hundred rolls of duct tape and four hot summer days straight in a bathroom, I emerged with a profound respect for the interaction of space and material,” he says. “From then on, I realized that I wanted to continue this investigation of objects and figure out their capabilities by pushing them to their full potential.”

Since then, with the support of Still House, Lynch has nurtured a body of work that is at once both primitive and highly refined, employing the often-banal flotsam of everyday life to execute pieces that hinge on a fine (and often quite literal) balance between the crude roughness of their material assembly and the delicacy of their composition.

The simplicity of Lynch’s assemblages is frequently their most beguiling asset. For Embrace (2012), Lynch merely placed two touching cinder blocks at a subtle angle, almost as though they were in italics. The familiar, rough-hewn shapes take on new life at this delicate lean, somehow recalling the fluid abstraction of Henry Moore without losing their utilitarian essence.

Similarly, in an untitled piece from 2012, a stacked column of cinder blocks canted at alternating angles with the help of brightly-colored golf balls undulates with new-found life. Other pieces are more playful. In Stop! Hammer Time (2012), the titular hammer balances improbably atop a scuffed-up baseball. Pieces like As a Bug (2011), in which a beer can teeters atop a basketball, which in turn rests on a wooden pedestal draped in trash bags, demonstrate Lynch’s interest in rhythm, balance, and gravity.

“You can tell a lot about a person based on their rhythm and the way they move,” Lynch says. “It’s my attraction to motion and rhythm in people that transfers over to that same attraction in the objects I choose and the way I arrange them. I often pick objects whose function relies on movement. I then strive to retain that energy in a frozen state.”

Lynch began making art in earnest around age twenty, but he didn’t attend art school, and “never thought in a million years that making art as a career was an option,” he says. It was only after he began working with Still House that his perspective changed. Since its inception in 2007 as an online platform, the co-founders of Still House, Isaac Brest and Alex Perweiler, have assembled a diverse roster of artists all working toward a common goal.

Lynch’s involvement in Still House developed organically. “My brother, Brendan Lynch, was an artist on their website and they were working on their first show in the summer of 2008,” he explains. “It was my first summer living in New York and I was friends with all of the guys and unemployed at the time so I just hung around and helped out wherever I could, painting walls, hanging work, and cleaning the floor. As the show came together I pitched the idea to duct tape the entire bathroom and they agreed to let me do it. When I was finished, the installation was well-received by the group and after that I wouldn’t leave. The whole production aspect of creating an exhibition and watching a raw idea come to life got me hooked.”

“We started as around a dozen kids looking for an outlet to exhibit,” says Brest. “As the majority of the group wasn’t attending art school, there was nowhere to make work, let alone show it. Alex Perweiler and I created an online viewing platform, and after a few exhibitions, we realized that this group worked so well together that it was necessary to architect an environment to house this energy. We had a trial run in an abandoned Department of Transportation office in Tribeca for eight months in 2010, then moved to a more organized facility in Red Hook in 2011 and have been there since.”

Brest calls Lynch “the model Still House citizen, an example of our organization’s ability to support young, non-formally-educated artists and lead them into sustainable careers.” Lynch has “an athletic clutchness about him,” according to Brest, who notes that “in the art world, it can be near-impossible to find people who really turn on when it counts. He’s one of those people. He’s always been super-reliable, humble, and, most importantly, eager to improve.”

Still House “supports a unit of young artists, providing them with an environment to conceptualize, produce, and exhibit their work. The strong emphasis on collaboration encourages members of the group to assist, critique, and formally represent one another, ultimately creating a collective drive that balances the advancement of individual careers with the growth of Still House the entity,” according to the organization’s mission statement. While other loose collectives of like-minded artists certainly exist in New York, Still House is unique, especially in its promotion of young artists without formal training. Still House offers the artists who make up its roster a supportive community in which to develop their work, and a permanent exhibition space in which to display it as part of an ongoing calendar of shows.

For his part, Lynch is happy to go on contributing to Still House’s forward momentum. “I don’t think that it has to do with a specific type of work or æsthetic that allows me to fit into The Still House Group,” Lynch says. “It’s more just my personality that fits in. Most of us were all friends before this became a real thing and I think that is the glue that holds us all together. We are all willing to drop our egos in order to help one another grow as artists and allow the group to progress. I think it’s the main reason that Still House has become somewhat successful.”

For more information, please visit EnterStillHouse.com.

Kevin Greenberg is the art editor of The Last Magazine. He is also a practicing architect and the principal of Space Exploration, an integrated architecture and interior design firm located in New York (SpaceExplorationDesign.com). In addition to his work for The Last Magazine, Kevin is an editor of PIN-UP, a semi-annual “magazine for architectural entertainment.”

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