Artist Tom Simon
April 24, 2018
On April 26th, the Art and Art History Department is pleased to welcome Tom Simon to DePauw University. The Brooklyn-based artist will present his work, influences, and methods for approaching contemporary sculpture as a viewer, a maker, and a curator.
We are surrounded by a material culture whose rotating contents are the result of a Darwinian process of selection based on desire and necessity. Our made things fill needs in a hierarchy ranging from the low--bodily necessity--to the high--intellectual or spiritual transcendence. Simon's work is informed by the languages and methods of consumption and mass production through his professional experience as a designer (of lamps, kitchens, album covers, books, catalogs, and architectural spaces); and as a consumer. These dual roles shape the merger of high and low culture in his work tempered by his question as an artist: “What need or desire am I trying to satisfy?”. His work as a sculptor is invested in the tactile, material, and bodily as much as it is in images and psychic projection.
Thomas Jefferson Simon (b. USA, 1984) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (B.S.), and received his M.F.A. In Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2013. Simon’s work combines sculpture, drawing, painting, printmaking, bookmaking, and digital animation. He creates objects and installations that mine art history, architecture, and his experience in contemporary design and manufacturing to examine personal narrative, mass production, and the commodification of fantasy and desire through layers of material, image and reference. Most recent exhibitions include No Pilota at SHOWROOM Gallery, New York, and the New Wight Biennial at UCLA, Los Angeles. He is the director of Coustof Waxman Gallery in New York. New York.
Public Event - Lecture
4:15pm, Thursday, March 26th
Peeler Auditorium, DePauw University, 10 West Hanna Street, Greencastle, IN 46135
free and open to the public