East of Colorado Springs lives a man with a penchant for the whimsical, a thirst for the colossal and an affinity for the natural world.
Tentacles of Patrick Shearn’s ebullient mind have reached into many corners of culture and history around the world: Hollywood, Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, Burning Man, Electric Daisy Carnival and the Olympics, to name a few.
His large-scale, experiential, public art installations are famous for the brief but joyful, awe-inspiring, meditative and healing impressions they leave on passersby.
“If it’s not fun, why bother doing it?” Shearn said. “I’m not motivated by dark human angst. Sometimes, artists get off on having to be a starving artist. I did a talk in San Francisco and was the last person to speak. Five or six artists were in front of me, all in black with an ‘aggro’ attitude. I went up, in this colorful shirt, and said I just wanted to make people happy.”
Born and raised in Black Forest and Colorado Springs, the many storied and accomplished man left in his early 20s and spent the next decades living and working around the country, including two decades in Los Angeles. He has proven that yes, you can indeed return home, and no, you will never be the same person when you return.
“Patrick is a shimmering success story of an artist coming out of the Springs with big dreams who went out and found his voice and identity as an artist,” said Joy Armstrong, director and curator of Galleries of Contemporary Art at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, where Shearn will have his first gallery exhibit in November.
“People from all walks of life can encounter one of his sculptures and find themselves immersed and lost in it without needing to know anything about art or the artist,” Armstrong said. “It just takes you away into a magical place where there is infinite possibility. There is such optimism.”
Here in Elbert, he now builds to life the visions that dance in his brain. Where, in the stillness of the woods, his neighbors think the 96-foot swaying carbon-fiber poles in his front yard, with bases the dimension of Coke cans that taper off into wisps, are radio antennae.
Those poles, titled Vanishing Points, from his Wind Dancer series, brought ephemeral delight to attendees at last year’s Burning Man event in Nevada.
“You get close and amongst them, and you’re like ‘I’m a flea, and how big is the universe and what’s my place in it?’” Shearn said. “It was a very sort of meditative space and beautiful.”
A cluster of large-scale internally illuminated crystals, made from corrugated polycarbonate and wrapped in Saran wrap, decorates his backyard, as does his piece “Chroma Cascade.” The large work from his Skynet series was selected for this year’s Art on the Streets, but had to be moved because its shiny bits, made from dichroic acrylic and hung on a net of stainless steel, were sparkling their colors a bit too brightly for nearby office workers.
“He has these wonderful ideas,” said Kevin Shinelikar Persaud, a Springs artist who recently started working for Shearn. “He’s not only at a stage where he’s capable of fleshing them out, but he also gives back to the arts community by giving artists jobs, paying us to be creative.”
Elbert is now Shearn’s base of operations for Poetic Kinetics, his creative arts and design studio that required five semitrailers to relocate from LA, and is much like it sounds — dreamy, experiential and surprising installations and kinetic sculptures that move in the wind. And on any given day, he dashes between Wonder and Whimsy, his two building-sized studios, unless he’s somewhere around the world giving talks about how and why he does what he does or installing his pieces.
“Some of it is Dr. Seussian,” he said. “I’ve got a whole sort of tangent going in that direction.”
Following the nudges
Shearn, whose mother, Merr Shearn, also was a local artist and art teacher, has spent his career dreaming extra large and in Technicolor. As he shoos Divorce, Cause and Calamity off the kitchen table, the three cats he shares with his wife and business partner, Desiree Barlow, he reminisces back to the beginning, when he did animatronics and made creatures for the movies, after attending film school in New York City. There were the dinosaurs and monsters he helped create for “Jurassic Park” and “Interview With a Vampire,” and the visual effects he did for “Fight Club” and the last two “Twilight” movies, among others.
He was spending a lot of time at Burning Man events and eventually started making big sculptures to take to the Black Rock Desert party, including an 80-foot aerial boom lift decorated to look like a flower. Comfort with industrial equipment came naturally thanks to years of construction and fishing jobs in Alaska after high school, while the giant flowers stemmed from his animatronics background.
A festivalgoer remembered that boom lift bloom and offered Shearn a gig doing a marionette show at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Through the help of an aerialist, animatronics, modern dance performers and heavy equipment, he created a heartwarming show about a 26-foot-tall terra cotta warrior who holds a spear in one hand and a 14-foot-tall little girl’s hand in the other. As a radio-controlled butterfly dances closer, the warrior must choose whether to drop the girl’s hand or the spear. It wouldn’t be a Shearn work if he didn’t choose to drop the spear and catch the creature. Man and child look at the insect before he releases it.
“It was so far out of my world,” said Barlow about her husband’s work. They met in LA. “I was in the music industry — it’s very corporate. He brought magic into my world. On our first date, he taught me how to weld.”
That Olympics installation was the genesis of Poetic Kinetics. In 2013, he devised “Helix Poeticus,” a giant, silver-skinned snail created around a variable-reach forklift that crawled its way across the fields at Coachella. Musicians on stage were befuddled when the silent mollusk silently slithered up to the stage to watch the concert.
In 2014, he once again contributed a giant, playful installation to Coachella with “Escape Velocity,” a kinetic astronaut with radio-controlled animatronics that allowed the suited space person to give lifelike gestures, like peace fingers and a thumbs-up.
“I play a lot with scale, because it’s relatively easy to change somebody’s sense of perception if you blow scale, like a giant astronaut or snail,” Shearn said. “You become a different kind of creature on the planet’s surface.”
And then Shearn birthed his Skynet series, dazzling kinetic sculptures he draped across cities, like 2016’s site-specific and guerrilla-style “Liquid Shard.” Under cover of night, and with the approval of the appropriate officials, Shearn and his team stretched a net of monofilament and holographic mylar across 1,500 square feet of Pershing Square in downtown LA. Silver ribbons of fabric hung off a net 15 feet high, but rose up to 115 feet in the air as the wind danced underneath.
“In the morning, security staff hadn’t been alerted and office towers were like ‘what is that?’” he said. “It blew up. In two days, one video had 25 million views, and 250,000 shares and my whole world blew up.”
His Skynet series has now decorated spots across the globe, including Dubai, Russia and Germany. The kinetic pieces that shimmy and sparkle in the wind were inspired by the natural murmuration of starlings, as they all move together as one entity.
“I’m interested in all these pieces emulating or amplifying nature,” Shearn said. “Where you can see what the wind is doing as it wraps around a building and comes up against the artwork, and all of a sudden everything becomes a different scale. You’re aware of the symphonic motion of wind through an environment we’re not really present to when we’re walking down the street. It brings you into a different relationship with your environment and the universe.”
In 2019, his 450-foot-long installation “Visions in Motion,” commissioned by the state of Berlin to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, floated above Brandenburg Gate, where the former wall divided the city.
The piece contained 120,000 pieces of fabric, 40,000 of which contained handwritten messages from Germans asking how they felt about walls, including former German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
And during the 10 days leading up to the event, Shearn brought the net down so people could walk underneath, read the messages, and write their own. Poetic Kinetics took that same piece and displayed it at the Demilitarized Zone between South and North Korea in 2022.
“I was able to create a piece of work that created a million little bridges,” he said. “You’d walk up and someone is weeping and you’d say, ‘what’s going on? I’m so emotional because I didn’t see my grandparents for seven years.’ I was touched to be able to create and witness that. A big part of my artistic direction now is to try to create these moments of bridging unity and making human connection.”
More recently, his Skynet series has become a darling of botanic gardens around the country, including Atlanta Botanical Garden and, most recently, the New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill in Boylston, Mass., where the site-specific “Flora in Flight” opened in June.
The massive, rainbow-colored installation features thousands of pieces of fabric shimmering through the trees and above the raised garden beds in the breeze.
“Our mission is to create experiences with plants that inspire people and improve the world,” said the garden’s director of education, Marissa Gallant, “and that fits with their work and vision, which explores human connection and emotion in our relationship to the natural world. We’ve already seen increased visitation.”
Now, Shearn and his team are working on his Enchanted Tree series, which will appear in several locations, including the 16th Street Mall in Denver, where he hopes in April to install full-size, kinetic aspen trees with stainless-steel trunks and tinted acrylic leaves that bounce dappled light off the surfaces around them.
“We’re making memories,” he said. “I will often take jobs for the experience rather than the money. Far more interesting to me is the potential social impact of creating an environment that’s immersive and where people let down their guard. The process of exploring those concepts with a client or the public is far more interesting to me than hey, look at my art on a pedestal.”
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