Tim Tate

I see my sculptures as self-contained video installations.

Blending a traditional craft with new media technology gives me the framework in which I fit my artistic narrative. Revelation, and in some cases self-revelation, is the underlying theme of my electronic reliquaries.

My interactive pieces can be seen as disturbing because the face that stares back from the video screen — your own — prompts a variety of responses: amusement, discomfort, embarrassment, something akin to the feeling you have when someone catches you looking at your own reflection in a store window as you walk by.

But the important revelations here are in the viewer’s response to my hybrid art form and its conceptual nature.  I try to bare everything, the guts of my materials and my inner thoughts, in deceptively simple narrative videos set into specimen jars. Nothing is random, all elements are thought out.

To me, these works are phylacteries of sorts, the transparent reliquaries in which bits of saints bones or hair — relics — are displayed. In many cultures and religions, relics are believed to have healing powers. My relics are temporal, sounds and moving images formally enshrined, encapsulating experiences like cultural specimens. And perhaps, to the contemporary soul, they are no less reliquaries than those containing the bones of a saint.