Artist Statement Time slows down balancing on the edge of our desire to move. Tension and weight thicken the feeling in a room. In space this work make us conscious of our bodies in relation to each other. They expand our awareness of ourselves within the Architecture. In part this work can be better understood as the liminal space between moments, or moments that are drawn out and magnified so that we might discover something hidden. In his posthumously published essay “Different Spaces” Foucault describes his last example of heterotopias as having the function within the remaining space either of creating an illusion within the space or of creating within it a different space entirely. As human beings we must become aware of our relationship to other people and our surroundings, otherwise we will blindly continue to exist in a perpetual loop of archetypes and repeated lapses of cultural déjà vu.
Process Tomasello thinks of everything in terms of the movement of paint. So much so, that she began to realize the relevance of viscosity in social scenarios. This is an important aspect of her sculpture and video work. She realized that people’s engagement with spaces can be greatly mediated by splitting the room. Moreover the tension of an actual heavy hanging object or balancing board can stop time for a second making people heavily aware of each other. Suspended in a moment, we are not unlike the pigments in oil. We cannot stop time but we can experiment with it in space. The marks of her art have ceased to be about her hand invested in a material. Now they have more to do with the object or time excerpt as a gesture of feeling in the room. The dialogue created by these various objects will evolve over time as the conversation is better understood.
Biography Taryn Tomasello was born in Boston, MA but has lived in Portland, OR for the past 7 years. She currently attends PNCA.
