No Better Place: Recent Works

Douglas Stapleton, Curator of Art, Illinols State Museum

Anatman stands tall and rigid, with arms curving upward around a polished, blank head. We can see ourselves in the reflective surface, inserting our presence into the formal proposition of the figure. We disappear as easily when we turn away, suggesting our impermanence. The piece's title, Anatman (2018), the Buddhist perception that we are not an unchanging, eternal self, speaks to that fleeting recognition.

Torn Skomski’s work from the early 2000’s to the present has an affinity with understanding our relationship to the world. The figure appears with a stronger insistence and frequency than in previous work. Diligence, perseverance, and enthusiasm—those efforts that bring about change are told through found and observed relationships with the natural world. Skomski’s work honors this ongoing, urgent, sometimes awkward negotiation with life as a process of creation. This shift towards an introspective engagement reflects changes in the artist’s life—a move to the country, a stroke—two defining actions that have presented new parameters for both inspiration and capacity to make work.

The land around Skomski’s home near Wedron, IL has offered new source material: uprooted trees, the Indian Creek nearby, seeds, found objects, the change of seasons. In Indian Creek (2003), two identical views appear as vertical mirror images, complicating the solid world from its reflection. Uproot—Locura (2018), is a section of trunk and root turned upside down, emerging now as a ghostly tree of knowledge from a carved wood head. The title suggests the physical reality of up-rootedness along with the suggestion of madness—the tangle of perception of found and altered objects stuck in the snare of the branches.

Physical and metaphoric reversals often conspire in Skomski’s work. We can see this shift of meaning in the wryly humorous jangling work gloves of Work, Play (1976) up through the fragile aluminum forms such as Can’t Clamp (2001). This molded aluminum form cf a c-clamp was one of Skomski’s first pieces made after his stroke. The artist, like the tool, is by appearance presumed whole but incapacitated, a declaration and acknowledgment of a change in circumstance, and an unwillingness to cease working.

Breaking points, moments of transition and release, and the suggestion of the energy required to bring about that change, are strong currents in Skomski’s recent works. Tipping Point (2018) consists of two moments of release—a fractured tree trunk—hovering, ghostly, over back-lit images of a spring thaw on the creek. Both events—one cataclysmic, one cyclical—honor the spectrum of force in the natural world. Other works that speak to release are Emergency (2018) and So Sorry I Had to Leave (2018), where trunk and branch forms float as figures before or above a bed-like structure. They suggest bodies presented for our acknowledgment and compassion. Emergency is a Man of Sorrows figure standing before us, flayed and broken. In So Sorry I Had to Leave, a silvered branch transmogrifies into a resurrected form, heaven bound. Both figures elicit a knowing in our body—their sturdy branches and trunk resonate with our own limbs and torso. Equally, the splintered trunk of Tipping Point carries a visceral charge.

Emotion runs serenely through Skomski’s work, conveyed through buoyant images of bodies in water and a strikingly simple but powerful series of photographs of found natural forms. Maia (2010) and Hand Aquarium (2010) present images of hands and arms reaching out of a rushing stream. They are the personificafion of water’s enticement’beckoning us to join the current.

Another group of work is of found natural specimens photographed in high relief, floating like celestial beings in a dark void. They’re compelling and direct, further nuanced by titles such as Burnt Man (2010) and The Brain that Changed Itself (2010), suggesting bodies that have survived and outlived trauma. Kiss (2010) shows two oonjoined husks engaged in an eternal embrace. In Bom Again (2010), bones and curling dried leaves personify death and rebirth, and in their grandly scaled three-panel format, suggest the tracery and soaring elegance of a Gothic church. These images are meditations on existence where the human, natural and cosmic scale cohabitate.

Skomski’s cruciform light box No Better Place (2010) encapsulates for me the artist’s view of our relationship to the world. The title refers to the condolences received at his mother’s funeral; that she was in a better place now. His response to them, ‘there is no better place’, states his belief in the here and now as what is meaningful. Skomski’s work points us to the present moment, revealing where we are now is the best place to understand our right relationship to this world.