MAKING IT THROUGH: QUINN IN QUARANTIMES
Interview By Carsen Greene
Photos courtesy of Quinn Tincher
Published Issue 081, September 2020
The Meow Wolf artist talks miniatures, mountains and making art through COVID-19
Quinn Tincher, founding member and Senior Artist at Meow Wolf, is still making and creating from his home. He’s been in quarantine, along with the rest of Meow Wolf’s employees, since March 13th. But he’s not letting that fact slow him down. The Sante Fe born and raised artist is still full steam ahead on art for one of our future exhibitions. He let us pick his brain a bit!
What are you working on?
I am creating 3D floating sculptures that collage reality into a glitchy conglomerate, an amalgam of motion and emotion trapped in time and displayed in still space. The sculptures themselves aren’t very large and the detail gets quite small, so for the last month, I have been creating itty-bitty little worlds.
The design I was able to create calls for an alleyway built into the inside of a geode. I went all in and made an abandoned German townhouse surrounded by brick and a fire escape, complete with a graffiti covered dumpster that is smaller than a nickel. I was able to teach myself how to make miniatures from scrap, using only sentra and paint. At the end of the week doing this, I had discovered a new super power and passion.
What music are you listening to?
At the moment, I am listening to Calypso as my five-year-old daughter shimmies around the room behind me in a Hawiian shirt; a change from yesterday’s AC/DC-fest in a sleeveless jean jacket.
My lovely wife is also locked-down with us and so I get a good dose of early 90s hip-hop and a bunch of Billie Holiday. But, if left to my own devices, which is not a lot these days, I tend toward Explosions in the Sky, This Will Destroy You, when I need to get deep into what I am doing on the workbench.
Is this the dystopian future you had expected?
I grew up in a trailer park at the very edge of civilization. The sun set over the volcanic ridges to the northwest of town and there was nothing but rocks and plateau between us and the ancient mountains. I used to have a recurring nightmare of the volcano erupting again; lava surging into the trailer park and my whole world melting little by little into nothing. This is dystopia for me, the inability to escape a slowly moving, inevitable destruction.
What I am experiencing now, what I see around me in not dystopia, it’s a chance to see how capable we all are. I don’t feel impending doom, I feel hope, because I see (for the first time in my life) a reason to care for each other, a reason to remember how important the health and happiness of others is, to each of us.
Check out more of Quinn’s work on Instagram.
THIS FEATURE WAS PRODUCED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH MEOW WOLF.
Carsen Greene is the Community Manager at Meow Wolf and the co-host of Movie Mavens Podcast featuring two deeply intellectual (pending) and curious women examining two films that are (sometimes) related in genre. Call it a spicy double feature.