Fly fishing is an angling technique that uses an ultralight-weight lure called an artificial fly, which typically mimics insects to attract and catch fish.

Big Fly Big Fish is a collection of art assemblages by artist and angler Kevin Byrd. It's the combination of two life-long pursuits: art-making and fly-fishing.

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I’ve always been drawn to the spontaneous and creative essence of play. This body of work began with a fun poke at the delicate tradition of fly tying:

What angler would ever cast such a ridiculously large fly?   

Searching for raw materials to make these flies, I stumbled into a chaotic web of old computer cords I somehow can’t let go: Why do I have Firewire 400 cables from 2007? This led to a second look at other household items—zip ties, USB cords, iPhone cables, speaker wires—all of it surely destined for a trash heap or that infamous island of flotsam in the Pacific.

As I composed these flies using pre-manufactured materials, a newfound clarity emerged: Here I am in San Francisco, a region that has birthed much new technology. It has permeated my house, my studio—it’s chatbots and Siri and Alexa and machine learning and large language models. It all attempts to emulate real human behavior, captivating us, in a trance perhaps.

In fly-fishing, man mimics nature by crafting artificial bugs and perfecting a cast that mimics a bug’s movement. Likewise, tech lures and catches by mimicking humans.

/Byrd