Artist Statement
Memory and value are primary themes in my art. Neither my neurodivergence nor my personal history are usually at the forefront, but they are driving forces from which I generate objects and experiences. I use a variety of frameworks as viewpoints from which I examine how we value objects and their ability to act as catalysts for a memory experience. This research helps me to further understand the inherent contradictions of value and the intangibility of memory. My artistic practice is continually evolving alongside my research and has grown from solely generating sculptural objects to the inclusion of installations and work as a curator and exhibition coordinator.
I grew up poor cut off from rich familial roots in a decaying mansion my parents never got around to fixing up. Our home was filled with objects whose monetary value was eclipsed by their familial-sociohistorical worth. Things that could be sold, but that were worth more to us than to anyone else. My introduction to coin, book, beetle, moth, antique, stamp, and rock collecting came through a variety of now dying social clubs focused on object-based activities. Much of my adolescence was (mis)spent exploring and looting souvenirs from abandoned buildings and experiencing a street level view of a city transitioning from textiles to finance.
Each process and material I employ speaks to a slightly different nuance of the paradoxes within my conceptual framework: ideas of extrinsic value and its mobility, the generative and transcendent nature of objects, and the relevance of context. Ideas from anthropology, object-oriented ontology, new materialism, and phenomenology weave their way into my work through the Queer act of transubstantiating quotidian objects once fetishized by others.
My practice as an object maker has been fueled by sourcing collections from estates and purchasing the contents of whole storage units. The items in both of these situations were kept for a reason other than their obvious use value. Collections tend toward glorifying multiple objects of a single type (possibly speaking to an association or fixation of the collector). Storage units (with a rent being paid to keep the contents of a unit in trust) even more obviously defer/negate the use-value of the contents and establish that they were of some value.
In installations such as Alone-Time and Invasive Species my work becomes a referent to the extended consequences of the premise that humans are solely animals. This protracted shift of thought of humans and what is “natural” led to a juxtaposition of forms that entangled visual referents to humans, labor, and arthropods. The materials in each of these installations playing a key role in their meaning with the former exhibition being composed primarily from over eighty pounds of lace purchased from the estate of one collector, and the latter incorporating ubiquitous “We Buy Houses Signs” alongside mirrors and a four-foot steel and Swarovski crystal sculpture evoking Japanese beetles and traditional chandeliers.
Email me at thomasadcornell@gmail.com