Artist’s Statement

 

            My work draws stylistic inspiration from the aesthetics of heavy metal album art, horror films, and apocalyptic science fiction, because of their aggressive stance against mainstream popular culture and, more importantly, their demonstrated futility as forms of resistance.  Everything in the world is beginning to converge, crawling toward a uniform deceleration where all depth is frozen into surface. A swelling growth of information has begun to undermine its own purpose, mimicking our inherent procedure for understanding and connecting everything to anything else.  

            I am using printmaking, drawing, painting, and simple collage techniques to assemble flattened chunks of this convergence. In the large scale drawings, various images of apparently useless, obsolete, or abandoned objects are woven together with tangled and viral masses of homogeneity, short-circuiting the representational function of any particular picture by building a rat’s nest of bleak, nonsensical context.  The smaller pieces examine a similar theme but begin with photographic images and pay sharper attention to their specific despondent context.  The work as a whole considers the notion of flatness as physically impossible, but culturally inevitable.

 

 

            Biography          

 

            Tom Wiehl was born and raised in Connecticut.  In 2000 he received his high school diploma from The Putney School in Vermont, his B.A. from Bennington College in Vermont in 2004, and his MFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2007.  He lives in Oakland, California.  He thinks it's awkward to write in the third person.