statement

Cody Bayne is an artist based in LA.
-born Knoxville, Tn
-lives /works Los Angeles

Cody Bayne is an interdisciplinary artist using painting, mixed-media, sculpture and new media to explore time, impermanence, coded vernaculars, identity & place. He has exhibited his work across the United States, Canada & Europe. Known for engaging a personal visual language his work creates intellectual and emotional connections with the viewer by using materials sourced from various cities around the world using a visual vernacular, that is both familiar and foreign at the same time. He coined the terms Neo- Urban Expressionism and Urban Informalism as quantifiers for his physical practice and to pay homage to the 20th century art movements Nouveau Réalisme and Art Informel. In 2021 his practice expanded by exploring new technologies in the New Media/NFT blockchain ecosphere. This new work is intimate and personal, exposing a raw and vulnerable biographical narrative his practice in the physical space has not addressed.

"I create a relationship between contemporary art and cultural intersectionality. By forging a visual dialogue transposed from walls, streets and a personal language my work strives for intellectual and emotional connection with the viewer. I use materials sourced from cities around the world, which serve as backdrop of urban decay creating a unique vernacular, one that is both familiar and foreign to all of us.
I’m drawn to beauty of flaws, the discarded and interested how it’s physically present everywhere yet overlooked concurrently.
I “harvest” information from the environment of the city and in my studio reassemble the materials. In so doing, I’m interested in communication between the materials I use and the sociocultural comments that the work leads to. The work is executed with a balance of formulaic parameters and action oriented process. Immediacy and accidental interventions play a strong role in the making of the work with intention to create connection to the beauty of the decayed and discarded. I allow my artist hand to be present and discernible in all my work as a symbol not only of humanity but also of distressed conditions and environments that inspire me.
Though I do not intentionally approach the work through a filter of social comment I am keenly aware, that by drawing upon these cues and visual references, the poetry of the metropolis leads to this conversation.
My work is both contemporary and academic. It addresses Impermanence, Coded Vernaculars, Identity & Place. By acknowledging legacy art movements and methods referenced in my work, I’m creating art based in an informalist approach influenced by the streets, modernism & contemporary art."