February 24 - March 10, 2023
The Car Wash is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new sculptural forms by Houston based artist Tom Bandage, Friday February 24th from 5-8pm.
The exhibition is composed of three totems to entropic interiority rendered in steel and aluminum. In these works the artist uses monochromatic grayscale and moderated reflective opacity to establish an encrypted surface.
The materials contain the possibility for reflection but eschew this in their natural state, creating a mask layer which simultaneously invites and rejects the viewer.
The physics of tension generates the forms, which are pressure bound from either side. Their geometric configuration dictates their orientation under this tension.
Physics, Anatomy, Violence, and Stoicism are all reasonable points of departure in the investigation of the work’s libidinal qualities. These are direct and immediate interpretations.
Tom Bandage (b.1992) is inspired by the machinist’s craft, the volumetric simplicity of Bauhaus, and the pure form of Neo-Plasticism. Tom Bandage attempts to capture the shape of intuition and experience through geometric contortions of material. By strictly playing with form and intentionally avoiding reference, his work aims to create a novel viewing experience.
His fascination with materiality and its immediate effect on the comprehension of space conjure the emotional weight of industrialism, removing architectural materials such as concrete and metal from their structural contexts and applying them to conceptions of form and space unmoored by utilitarian purpose but constrained by the axes of physics.
This procedural production of internally-consistent structures is the sublimation of the pre-linguistic and the epistemic – the interaction through which formless curiosity and formalized knowledge systems reach equilibrium. Influenced by the mathematical concepts of graph theory, automata, and encryption, he attempts to create systems that produce their own internal logic, reproducing them visually as physical metaphors.
The creative restrictions of analog architectural drafting processes combined with the inherent limitations of materiality allow him to achieve a Warholian factory-like effect, where individual pieces are selected from a set of iterations, without a focus on producing the “right answer” or arriving at a final destination.
Recent exhibitions include Reeves Art + Design, Hardy & Nance, Foltz Fine Art, Dimension Gallery, Flight Gallery, and a permanent installation in the Paved Garden sculpture park in Austin, Tx.
His cited inspirations include Alexander Calder, Donald Judd, Dieter Rams, Gilles Deleuze, Frank Lloyd Wright, John Cage, Egon Schiele, and Sergio Leone.
Reception: February 24, 2023 | 5–8 pm
900 Richmond Avenue
Houston, 77006 Texas
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