Multidisciplinary artist Typoe’s gallery exhibitions are anticipated events, and his public artworks are notable landmarks in Miami and beyond. Recently he has completed a vibrant installation which has transformed the interior of Miami’s new Brightline high-speed rail station, and at the Andy Warhol Museum he created an eye-popping mural that enlivens the streetscape around the museum. These, and other high-profile projects in planning, are important in understanding Typoe’s practice, which is public facing and committed to engaging his audience: “My public practice is my number one concern,” he notes.
Typoe’s current series Die Form is an extension of his previous series Forms from Life. Inspired by children’s building blocks, Forms from Life are large-scale, three-dimensional abstract and symbolic icons that can be freely moved about to present varied compositions in space. The works pointedly reference the history of building blocks as groundbreaking educational tools that sought to foster the life- affirming creative instinct in children. These blocks, initially invented by Friedrich Fröbel in the nineteenth century, have had a surprising influence for generations and have been cited by prominent artists and architects as being significant in their artistic development. Typoe’s block sculptures resonate for both children and adults, encouraging joy, play, and creativity, while suggesting through such symbolic icons as skulls and ravens that life also has challenges.
Adopting the vernacular of illuminated commercial signage, Die Forms are shaped light boxes that expand upon Typoe’s symbolic vocabulary. Typoe designs and refines his pictorial icons with great care to find the right balance among visual impact, clarity, and depth of meaning. His icons include the hand of God (from Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam), a flower (from the Louis Vuitton logo motif), a raven (Edgar Allan Poe), a skull, an hourglass, a tombstone, and a cloud. These are combined with geometric shapes such as circles, squares, and triangles. In each composition these elements are rearranged on the wall in new formal relationships. “I can play with balance on the wall in a way I cannot as sculpture,” says Typoe. “Things can barely touch, almost collapse, or hover in a beautiful way. I want to find a happy medium when some things are fragile and some more sturdy.”
Just as the visual balance between the fragile and the stable generates an energizing visual tension, so too does the balance between the bright and joyful icons and the deeper implications suggested by skulls, hourglasses, and tombstones. “I think about life, I think about my own life, I often think about my mortality,” Typoe says. “Not in a dark way but in an inspiring way. It is a double-edged sword.” Die Forms are in part contemporary vanitases, reminding the viewer of the transience of life and the ephemerality of material pleasures, but unlike the cautionary warnings of traditional vanitases, Typoe sees his reminders as making life all the more valuable and worthy of celebration.