JULY 22 - 29
I have installation/video works that I would like to install, a community/invited artist sculpture project, and maybe a drawing performance that could happen in the space.
Derek Toomes is an artist based in Raleigh, NC. He is currently the Digital Director and an MFA candidate at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Derek is drawn to the iconic imagery of popular culture, as he is equally interested our societal location as a culture inundated by imagery. His sourcing as well as appropriation of images allows Derek to create work that is aesthetically and anthropologically situated within culture, while also commenting on that culture. His images, videos, and kinetic objects are both: self aware, and art aware, as they operate as contemporary atavistic viewing experiences.
Having spent an extended time in Los Angeles, Derek’s work is also influenced by Latino art. He often uses richer textures, more luxurious colors, and more ornamental, hand-drawn lettering, which both compliment and provide a stark contrast to his grittier, more urban techniques. He works with a number of mediums from aerosol paint, marker, wheat paste, and acrylic on conventional sized canvases, to large installations that incorporate video and robotic elements.
Derek’s work has been featured in various progressive art shows, including; North Carolina Museum of Art, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, and he has been invited to work on an array of collaborative art projects throughout Northern America.
Artist Statement:
In my most recent work, the use of technology as visual medium, has largely guided my manipulation of materials and space, resulting in temporal and kinetic objects and forms. Technology allows for me to continue my interests in the pairing of a pictorial content, with that of an experiential content, one that is largely sensory, operating as an intervention in viewing space and in time. The work on view here, represents a proto-step or stage in my development toward the use of a full technological palette.
The use of static and ‘flat’ images still interest me as I mine them symbolically and present them obliquely, as artifacts within conversation with one another. I do not think of the images as causal themselves, as content and meaning are not a direct consequence of naming or recognizing them, but rather as individuated moments, between which a rich paradox arises via the implicit contrasts of: image, material approach, multiplicity, and the interjection of text.