A Separate Reality – The Works of Thomas Skomski

Marlena Doktorozyk-Donohue, Professor of Art History at Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, California
October 1996

Works by Chicago-based sculptor Thomas Skomski – early 1982 carved totems, the 1992 pieces using ephemera like light, water, sand, and these recent works of hefty woodraise complex questions regarding the nature of human experince.

Schooled in Zen Buddhism, shamanism, American Indian cultures, Skomski’s art gives him away as an advocate (or at least a serious student of) some irreducible unity of experience, a pre-linguistic “being” residing outside of intellectual constructs.

For most of us, this other way of “being” tends to get obfuscated by day-to-day seemingly unavoidable processes like cognition, ideation, and a transaction. “Those are ways we fix objects in the mind and they are convincing consciousness habits”, says the artist. “But they are an inaccurate reflection of an essential reality. In my work I try to present the possibility of this other non categorical experince”

This is not just art esoterica, nor is it warm and fuzzy New Age lingo; ontological ideas like these have spoken to the very heart of what means to be human through no less than Zen poet Shonin, Plato, Spinoza, Jung, Sartre, and most recently, Michael Foucoult.

With his inquiries, Skomski places himself at the crux of the decade-long somiotic debate in art theory (and philosophy, politics and religion) that pits a notion of some timeless, unifying Truth or archetypal sin quo non against the post modern view of reality as no more and no less than a string of context-bound, person and group-specific meaning choices – usefully relative abstractions.

More and more, in very real ways these two poles bear on how we view the parameters of art (and all expression), how we view each other (essentially alike, essentially different), and how we address in the cyber 21st century an exploding multiplicity of thought, information, social roles, religion, culture, aesthetics.

Where contextualists (and their forbears like Nietzsche and Sartre) would argue that there is no Truth, only numerous choices, Skomski’s work suggest that indeed there exists moments, specialized or accidental as they’ve become in modern positivist culture (e.g. Sartre’s uncanny childhood realization of his essential separateness, the practice of meditation, primitive rites and contemporary rituals like art) during which opposites, boundaries, what Martin Buber called subject/object distinctions are called into question and we are left to consider the nature of human consciousness and what we are, pure and simple.

To get at the “pure and simple”, Skomski has through his career parred down media – 90s works used mainly the refractive principle of water and light – to lead the viewer into the most direct and phenomenological confrontation with the illusionary character of duality and categorical thought.

The formal spareness of that work gave pieces a deceivingly cold veneer. Here Skomski (who began as a wood carver) turns again to rough hewn, organic hunks of wood ( plus stone, metal, concrete and light) to come at the same philosophical synthesis through the conduits of intuition, poetry, emotion and Nature.

For his show, Skomski takes as his leitmotif the vague shape of a book resting on his spine, seen form the side, covers ajar, pages unfurling a create a “V”. The form suggests those very objects that selectively reify/package transient meaning as irrefutable truths: dictionaries, lexicons, fact books.

In “The Misuse of Meaning” the archetypal “V” is made by actual pages of a dictionary crinkled and separated to suggest branch-like compartments pointlessly shelving or classifying identical pebbles. the physical effort required for pulp to carry rock, the effort required to decipher the levels of form, content, syntax and ontology are the subtle strategies animating our response to this piece.

In the huge, installation-scale “Bloom”, sheets of industrial strength expanded steel suggest, once again, big, book pages organizing, then compressing, then barely supporting massive face-like ovals carved from wood to bear (in the artist’s words) “their own identifying wounds.”

This show also includes “Self Army”, from 1987 that happen to use the inverted “V” and dealt with like themes. The kinetic walk-in piece mounts a tray of water at the apex of a room size triangle formed by two mirrors. The angled relationship of one mirror to the other results in a circular repetition phenomena such that as viewers enter the space they see themselves standing in a circle of 16 identical reflections. Simultaneously, the tray of water at the apex with controlled light passing through it sends waves of fluid and cascading light descending over the viewer and the reflected space.

What is seen then, is a collection of selves, all different, all the same apprehending each other. Using a simple Zen-ish world of experience, Skomski walks consciousness into a awkward collision with “self,” with duality and separation, than seamlessly effects the realization that fragmentation is bogus, a sleight of the eye/mind.

Whatever his philosophical/spiritual agenda, Skomski’s deftness as a thinker and craftsman makes these sculptures operate believably on varied levels, to assorted sensibilities.

First, as sheer “shibui,” Japanese for reductive elegance. Second as elaborate existential analogues in which we are forced to confront through our very own senses a moment on time when mutually exclusive constructs – matter and non matter, weightlessness and gravity, press and pull, beauty and scar – co-exist, interchange. Finally (and this is what will give Skomski’s work durability in an artworld not yet ready for overt spirituality), this artist has an intuitive knack for the tight conceptual technique – sentient participation, truth to process, perception of simple objects/shapes/relations – at the backbone of no nonsense post modern (Cage/Beuys/Fluxus) methodology bent on replacing the worn depicted metaphor with art as action.