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  Iteration

click for larger view   Monotype 17

click for larger view   As the Crow Flies
 
Bio
 
 

Tom Butter has been living and working in NYC since 1977. He has been exhibiting sculpture in NYC since 1981, and has participated in many one person and group exhibitions nationally and internationally.

In recent years, Tom has been working on monotypes and drawings as well as sculpture.

Tom's work is included in several major museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Walker Art Center. He has taught at many college graduate and undergraduate programs, including RISD, Yale, MICA, Tyler School of Art, Boston Museum School to name a few. Recently he was a visiting lecturer at Harvard University.

Currently, Tom is the Coordinator for the Parsons MFA Fine Arts Program.

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Artist Statement
 
 
I present dualistic tensions between materials and systems in my work in order to suggest the functional incompatibility of so many things in our world: representation and reality, life and death, relationships between people. My sculpture is divided in fundamental ways in order to focus on the means of opposition as well as the means of joining. This duality requires, and produces, both doubt and hope. Elements are combined so they can work together, but they do not become part of a seamless whole. Many of the pieces have rotating, spinning or balancing elements expressing transience and mutability. Translucent fiberglass works in opposition to solid form by allowing the penetration of light. Steel structures hold space and define edges efficiently, with a 19th century engineering logic. The resulting work is both with and against the natural world. This tension or polarity illuminates our own sense of being in the world, and concurrently feeling separate from it. Unusual and interesting aspects of presence emerge from the amalgam of the materials and forms with which I work.

My monotypes offer a parallel experience on paper. The drawing represents objects, which are simultaneously situations -the tension between these produces a duality with a similar outcome as that in the sculpture. Ultimately, I want my work to have a replete physicality, with a belief in its power to evoke the here and now.

 
  ©2006 Tom Butter is a fine artist from New York. This site contains his recent portfolio of sculpture and monotype work.  Site design by dan sherman