Contact:
For additional information or inquiries please email Thomas Wharton at thomasewharton@gmail.com
Artist Statement:
I am concerned with how light and shadow define physical space, create illusions, reflections, and moods. To that end, I sculpt wooden “spindles,” which I use as dimmer switches for modernly inspired luminaires to create sets for still-life images. They are press fit into pedestals or other receptacles. They control lighting solutions, function as sundials, or as stand-alone sculptures. They are lightly grounded, just touching or grazing a base, have surfaces that specifically reflect or diffuse, and are symmetrical.
The resulting artworks are drawings, photographs, paintings, and sculptures of these sets that use a pared down vocabulary of rectangles and circles. The tops of sculptures may appear as tangible objects floating in a reflecting pool or incorporeal circles of negative space. Images are repeated on multiple surfaces, transposed in different media; sculpture to canvas, canvas to photograph, photo to charcoal, etc. Drawn and painted canvases encapsulate digital prints and re-represent light and shadows captured in photographs. Traditional oil paintings depict the same materials at different angles to provide asymmetrical snapshots of symmetrical compositions.
As sculptural arrangements are reframed and reinterpreted in different media the spindle becomes a landmark directing a viewer through artworks, providing indications of spatial awareness, touch, and function. The space around a picture, the lighting of the exhibition space, and the positions of the viewer, are all devices I use to direct an audience’s gaze through a picture (as it were a window) or at a picture (as it is an object). Though the subjects in my work represent something tangible, and even useful, pictorial compositions can make the work appear abstract; what is known is distorted with what is shown. The spindle is a key to navigating each window.
My impetus to design and create these devices has been threefold:
- To make an object that controls Light.
- To make images of and with this object.
- To make an object that is transformed if the viewer were to become a user.
With my intentional, intersectional, manipulation of image and object, I often utilize one medium to express another. I aim to make work that considers how a type of artistic practice (drawing, painting, sculpture, etc.) can be manipulated to signify visual languages other than the mediums used to create the work.
Bio:
Thomas Wharton (b. 1987) received his BFA from Savannah College of Art and Design in 2011 and his MFA in Painting from the University of Tennessee Knoxville in 2015. His work is included in many institutional collections including the Old Omaha Association Art Collection; Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA; and the Savannah College of Art and Design. Wharton has exhibited nationally at First Street Gallery in New York; GCADD in Granite City, Illinois; and Satellite Contemporary in Las Vegas, among others. He has been published in New American Paintings, Burnaway Magazine, and Numbers Inc. Thomas received numerous awards including a Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center and the Sylvia Smith ’73 Artist in Residence program at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. The artist currently lives in Sioux City Iowa, where he is an Assistant Professor of Art and Director of the Clausen Art Gallery at Briar Cliff University.