Just after the raptors learn how to open doors in “Jurassic Park,” right as they’re entering the kitchen to gobble up Lex and Tim, a human hand steadies one of the raptor’s tails.
That hand happens to belong to southern Colorado artist Patrick Shearn.
Shearn got his start in slashers. One of his first big projects was “Metamorphosis: The Alien Factor” (a film he doesn’t recommend). A fresh graduate of the School of Visual Arts, he initially worked for free until it became apparent that he knew his stuff better than the visual effects supervisor, who was fired and replaced by Shearn.
Shearn has been passionate about special effects ever since he watched “Star Wars” in theaters.
“I trashed a couple apartments in New York trying to do the chemical side of things, making foam, latex and plaster,” joked Shearn. He soon became interested in animatronics and taught himself mechanics.
Shearn has always loved problem-solving, constantly teaching himself new skills. His philosophy is that every problem, no matter the field — art, science, mechanics — boils down to variables. If you determine the variables, you’ll find the solution.
“Tell him it’s impossible, and then he’ll be like, ‘Well, hold on…’” joked his wife, Desiree Barlow.
Shearn’s first big break was working on an animatronic Tyrannosaurus Rex for “Back to the Future: The Ride” with filmmaker and special effects pioneer Douglas Trumbull.
Not long after, he moved to Los Angeles and was hired by Stan Winston Studio, the special effects company behind “Terminator,” “Aliens,” “Predator,” “The Thing” and, of course, “Jurassic Park.”
Shearn eventually became a visual effects supervisor. But despite filling that role for over a decade, he found that it was a lot of dark computer rooms and software. It missed that tactile quality of practical effects.
“I got into doing animatronics and robotics because as soon as that thing comes to life and starts moving, as soon as motion is incorporated into the artwork … there’s a change in the room,” Shearn said. “Emotion is generated by motion.”
Shearn carries that ethos into “Off the Beaten Path,” an art installation unveiled at the Green Box Arts Festival on June 27.
The 6,000-square-foot rope net stapled with nearly 36,000 pieces of ultra-lightweight kite fabric will be suspended over Gazebo Lake in Green Mountain Falls through October. The Colorado town just west of Manitou Springs is so small that “Off the Beaten Path” is an unmistakable centerpiece. At the morning unveiling, its rufflings in the wind created the sound of gentle waves as onlookers compared its look to a willow tree, a mythical firebird and an upside-down field of colorful grass.
As for Shearn, he compares the installation’s movement to a school of fish or murmurations of starlings.
“There’d be clouds of birds flying around. I find watching that to be this magical experience. Something’s going on that I don’t understand,” Shearn said. “To me, it’s just raw beauty.”
“Off the Beaten Path” is just the latest in a long line of Shearn’s “Skynets” (yes, the name is a “Terminator” reference).
The Skynet series began when Shearn found himself with an excess of holographic mylar. Shearn explained that the Willy Wonka Candy Company had planned on using the material for a candy bar wrapper, but it was unusable for some unknown reason. Somebody in the company connected them with Shearn, who’d established himself as an installation artist in Los Angeles some years prior.
“I was a starving artist, and I’m like, ‘Sure, free material. Whatever. That’d be great,’” Shearn recalled.
Six months later, a semi truck arrived at his studio with 28 rolls of holographic mylar, each eight linear miles long. Shearn’s still using the rolls to this day.
Shearn used much of the holographic mylar on a Skynet called “Liquid Shard.” In 2016, it was installed overnight in Pershing Square in Los Angeles as a surprise to the city.
The color of the holographic mylar blended perfectly into the industrial silver hues of downtown Los Angeles. Designing around an environment has remained an important tenet of the Skynet series. A few key factors made Green Mountain Falls a treat to design for, Shearn explained.
“The contrast of the color against the lush green — I find that punctuation to be really nice. The vibrancy of the blue sky. The clouds that are constantly changing,” Shearn mused. “In some of the forested environments we put pieces into, you’re constrained because you can’t let the thing blow in the trees. So, this was a really open canvas.”
Shearn has designed almost 30 Skynets around the world. “Sky Gazing” was designed for Burning Man 2024 and looks like a magic carpet flying over the desert. In the New England Botanic Garden, “Flora in Flight” mingles with the vegetation. In 2019, “Visions in Motion” was commissioned to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, with messages by the German people — including one by former Chancellor Angela Merkel — handwritten on the fabric streamers. In 2022, “Visions in Motion” was repurposed in the Korean Demilitarized Zone as part of the DMZ Peace Arts Festival.
Despite so much experience creating and installing Skynets, their installations don’t always go off without a hitch. In the case of “Off the Beaten Path,” it was discovered that the staplers used to secure the pieces of kite fabric to the rope net weren’t closing all the way, leading some pieces to fall off in the wind.
“We came back out, took the whole piece down, took it back to the studio, re-stapled 35,000 streamers over a long weekend and brought it back out again to reinstall it,” Shearn explained.
That feat certainly wouldn’t have been possible without Shearn’s talented team at his company, Poetic Kinetics.
Poetic Kinetics got its start with a 2005 Burning Man installation, “Hope Flower & Venus Flytrap.” Shearn conceptualized the piece after he saw an 80-foot-tall aerial boom lift at Burning Man one year and realized it was the same equipment he’d learned to use while working in construction in his 20s.
“Hope Flower & Venus Flytrap” led to a commission by Johnson & Johnson for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, “The Warrior and the Girl,” a choreographed performance piece featuring the massive marionettes of a terracotta warrior and a girl.
Then based in Los Angeles, Poetic Kinetics continued to wow with large-scale art installations like the iconic Coachella Astronaut, which debuted in 2014.
Shearn grew up in Colorado Springs and relocated Poetic Kinetics to Elbert in 2023 for many reasons: his parents were aging, the heat of Los Angeles was becoming unbearable and his rent for five acres in Colorado was half of what he was paying for 7,000 square feet in California.
“Off the Beaten Path” is just the latest of Shearn’s Colorado pieces. Earlier this year, his debut exhibit, “Psychullesence,” was on display at the Galleries of Contemporary Art at UCCS. A series of kinetic tree sculptures recently debuted at 16th Street Mall in Denver. “Off the Beaten Path” will be available for the public through October, and Poetic Kinetics is even open to studio visits.
“I believe strongly in democratizing artwork,” Shearn said. “To be able to bring artwork and beauty to the public and allow anyone to engage in it without needing to understand a lot of complicated words and artists’ statements … is really something that motivates me.”