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

My practice spans painting, mixed media, sculpture, and new media, grounded in an exploration of time, impermanence, identity, and place. I work primarily with materials sourced from the urban landscape of Los Angeles—letterpress posters, construction debris, paper fragments, signage, tape, and concrete—but I also create objects and sculptures that reflect and respond to this information. These elements form the foundation of a personal visual language that echoes the layered, ever-changing city around me. I see these materials as witnesses—carrying the imprint of specific sites, histories, and overlooked narratives. My work is less concerned with representation and more focused on presence: how surfaces, objects, and language accumulate meaning through time and exposure. Text often emerges—sometimes meaningless, sometimes partially legible—its meaning fragmented, eroded, or obscured through layering and erasure. I’m interested in how visual information—signage, markings, textures—slips from legibility into abstraction, inviting viewers to navigate the work through intuition and personal association rather than fixed direction.. Layering becomes a way to reflect memory’s unreliability, where clarity recedes into ambiguity.
Concrete plays a central role in my recent work. It functions as both surface and structure—a way to lend permanence to impermanent materials. Its use ties the work back to the built environment of the city; it is a medium of construction and inscription, of mark-making and monumentality. I often scribe or embed language into the surface, only to partially obscure it, creating a deliberate tension between what’s seen and what’s hidden.

My longest-running series, Disparate Renewal, began in 2013 and concluded in 2025. Each work in the series documents an evolving engagement with the city's shifting landscape—its decay, its development, its ruptures, and repairs. The series reflects a decade-long inquiry into the visible and invisible forces shaping the urban environment and the role of material as both subject and witness.