Featured Artist
Visual artist Tyler Barrett
"Art is love. It is the future that could save us."
Tyler Barrett was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and has resided in Hindman, Kentucky, since 2020. He has been an artist his entire life, working professionally in various mediums since 2015, the majority of which includes designing logos freelance, self-marketed merchandise, and creating merchandise graphics for Hindman Settlement School. He has several graphic art and photography publications in Kentucky Monthly, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Untelling Literary and Arts Magazine, and Troublesome Rising: A Thousand-year Flood in Eastern Kentucky. Tyler’s work has also been exhibited in several solo shows and local businesses including, The Art Station (Appalachian Arts Alliance), Appalachian Artisan Center, Read Spotted Newt, Hazard Coffee Company, and The Mountain Muse.
Heavily inspired by the circularity of energy, liminal space, textures, and nature’s oddities, his work reflects and ripples perspectives of common thresholds of reality, celebrating our unique human interpretations of the universe. A running catalogue of his graphic art, as well as available merch, can be found on Instagram @ch3x_mix, and @memento.per.lumen for photography.
About the work included in the galleries below, Tyler Barrett writes:
Four things I know, for certain, to be true:
I.
Art is gravity,
by the universe within each of us.
It is the singularity flowing between worlds,
carving history,
dancing on two sides of its atmospheric intention.
II.
As simply an act of creation, it's the process to save an artist from themselves,
so the energy of ideas won't unravel us.
Lifelines on rolling waves, rescued by the medium and the expression.
That act of transporting awareness, filtering reality enough to sustain the width of our cliff's edge.
III.
And also, the oxygen stored in audience interpretation.
Art breathes, through how others find themselves within the entity, how the frame of it holds them.
Like a mirror, caressing or crumbling by its reflection or translucency.
Exposing perspectives, and unearthing emotions from raw atoms.
Sculpting a prism, like mist and morning sun.
We refract ourselves amongst the canvas.
IV.
Art is love.
It is the future that could save us,
how we can transcend from this liminal human-ness,
The only way to grasp a conscious infinity.
We keep what we've found by giving it away.
