About The Artist
Timothy McHargue has been working with light art, video and installations for 10 years. He has exhibited his artwork in galleries and cafes in Sacramento and was chosen for a public art project in Manhattan Beach, the city of his birth by the ocean, in 2016.
He has also published extensively as a creative writer and freelance journalist with columns, feature stories and investigative pieces on art, entertainment, and social issues. He has also published three collections of prose poetry: Typography of the Flesh: Thirty Prose Poems; Bali Rain Psalm; and Wig Bubbles and his short stories and poetry has appeared in many literary journals.
He plays guitar and composes songs, and recently produced a CD of original music called "Into the Real." Timothy has been exploring the intersection of writing, art and music and has engaged in performance art using multimedia at various venues.
Timothy's professional experience includes working as a school psychologist and counselor, and most recently, directed a college program for students with disabilities. Interestingly, he also worked as a counselor at an international school and wrote a book about that experience titled Strange Dances: Reflections on Counseling International Students in Indonesia. He lived for four years in Jakarta on the island of Java—where it was almost impossible to find a good cup of coffee. Mountain biking in the Himalayas and scuba diving with giant turtles in a Borneo marine sanctuary were peak experiences while living overseas.
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Artist Statement
My light sculptures began as a quest for immersing myself in refractory light, preferably with colorful augmentation. I was interested in engaging the eye with flashing fragments of light and color. This urge speaks partly to the desire for stimulation and novelty, partly to the desire for beauty and eye-pleasing sensory experience, and partly to the need to make something more interesting than that which emits from pixels produced by my television. Maybe, an unconscious communiqué to the divine?
These experiments engage the eye in a primal way that speaks to that which makes us human, and that which provides the impetus to produce culture in the first place. I notice that my cat, Chai, has inspected the light sculptures and sees something, I surmise, resembling the lightning flash of insects and birds. This may be the very same things, from an evolutionary perspective, that draw our own eyes to gleaming glints of illuminated particles, pixels and movie pictures.
The light art sculptures and installations are viewed as rudimentary attempts to communicate to an unknown deity regarding messages of an aesthetic and existential nature. They create a code, semaphore, a semiotic means of communication that speaks in an inarticulate visual language—if we only had the vocabulary to express our ecstatic experiences. Consider these light sculptures, boxes and totems, as forms of painting with light, preliminary attempts to create personal narratives, give glory and create colorful cables to the Universe.
Art Practice
I grow giant Japanese Timber Bamboo in my backyard. I harvest the bamboo on a regular basis. At some point I decided to save the bamboo stalks and use these to create handcrafted art pieces. This artwork I call Bamboo Totems. I invented a tool to drill through 6- or 8- or 10-foot bamboo stalks. I then drill holes in the sides of the Totems, 200-300 each, and place marbles in the concave holes. Next, I run LED lights up the center and program the lights for desired color and effect. These are then either placed vertical on a rotating platform or hung on the wall. They are colorful and a crowd-pleaser when displayed in public galleries. I love the bamboo plant, which has so many uses and applications. It gives me pleasure to use hand tools and work with this material, such a phenomenon of nature.
