Elegy of the Last Republic 028: Sun's Out Guns Out | Son's Out Guns Out, 2018 Collage

Cody Bayne is an Artist based in Los Angeles. Cody's work explores time, impermanence, coded vernaculars, identity & place He makes mixed-media works which he refers to as Urban Informalism or Neo-Urban Expressionism. He has been compared with key artists of the 20th century - Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg & Warhol due to how he creates work that establishes a relationship to contemporary culture by forging a new visual language. N.U.E. offers the opportunity sociocultural comment that lays at the intersection of Graffiti, Art Washing & the Contemporary Art by establishing a new urban vernacular that can also be referred to as Urban Informalism. ||| I create a relationship between contemporary art and cultural intersectionality. By forging a visual language and personal dialogue 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 urban vernacular, one that is both familiar and foreign to all of us. In essence, I see the work as a unification of familiars. 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 dialogue 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. By acknowledging legacy art movements and methods referenced in my work, I’m creating art based in urban informalism influenced by Street Art, Graffiti, Modernism & Contemporary Art.