THE EARLY WORK (1970’s–2000)

Edward Maldonado
Co-Curator and
former Curator of Art
Chicago Cultural Center

Tom Skomski’s 50-year development as a sculptor brings to light the persistent evolution by an artist who has continually moved toward the refinement of craft coupled with the development of ideas central to the work. Beginning with some of his earliest wood carvings and drawings of human figures and animal forms in early 1970’s, Skomski utilized the subjects as artistic opportunities to shift their meanings, imbuing the carvings and drawings with magical qualities that recall ethnographic effigies and primitive cave paintings found throughout the world.

These and later works point to a sculpture that is not limited to its material properties, an idea that had driven much of abstract and minimalist art of the last half century, in order to develop a sculpture that is less fixed and more revelatory about the nature of things. In some respects, the early work and later, give a nod to the influential American sculptor, H. C. Westermann (1922–1981) who utilized traditional carpentry as a vehicle to create scathing commentary on social issues. But where Westermann’s work looked to outward to the public sphere, Tom's work took an inward turn, in order to examine the nature of things and the human condition. Tom's work from the mid-1980’s through the 1990’s reflects his developing interest in minimalist art, so prevalent in this period.

The pieces from this period included fabricated and found objects such as steel, marble, sand, rubber, and glass, and impermanent materials like water and light. Several series emerged, including the “More Equal” series; a series of works that utilize cages and cage forms; or overtly figurative pieces such as Body Bag (male & female] 1995, as well as large scale installations. Equally important, Skomski began the use of photography to document his performance art. These works reflect on the limits of the human self, as well a concern for sculpture to have broader meaning. It is important to point out that during this period, Skomski also developed an enduring interest in Buddhism from which ideas such as fluidity, impermanence, and no self also came to influence the work.

The cage pieces in particular offer an analogous form to the human body, by creating a limiting “skin” that protects and/or incarcerates whatever is contained within. These pieces often bring together substantive and contradictory materials. Materials such as steel and felt as in Can I Help You, 1990 interact with each other and shuttle between what is physical and what is impermanent and transitory. Works such as Embedded, 1992 and Vale, 2001 from the More Equal Series, float on the wall as the materials of which they are made dissolve into a lighter state of being. They imply a loss of weight, a loss of substance, or a state of transformation. These are conditions that are fleeting, conditions that that cannot be easily fixed except in the mind, but nevertheless speak to conditions of the self.

Works like these manage to transform the physical properties of sculpture into a more fluid vision of the hand-made object, serving to open the door to possibilities that minimalists may not have originally intended. That art, defined as reductive, self-referential, or essentialist, removed the human form, and to a great degree, removed the indexical markers of human touch. Minimalist sculpture often looked as if it was produced in a machine shop or factory (and often it was).

In the case of minimalist and abstract painting, the human touch was replaced by the delineated contours of abstract forms that offered only the flat surface of the painting to carry meaning. However, Skomski’s work (though certainly not his alone) provide an alternative reading to minimalism’s reductive approach. Brice Marden and Vija Clemins’ paintings, or Chris Burden or Robert Gober’s sculpture of the same period, gave back meaning—or the search for meaning—through the use of ordinary objects found in the world, or through the use of a fluid paint that reclaims the human touch. The motivations might be different for each, but their work retrieved for art the dialog with the human condition. In this respect, Torn Skomski's work stands in good company with his contemporaries.

It is important to remember here that in 2001, Tom Skomski suffered a massive stroke that paralyzed the left side of his body and left him in a wheelchair for a long period of recuperation. Nevertheless, Tom slowly regained his abilities, and importantly, returned to produce his new works of sculpture and experiments with photography that marks the new and latest phase of his evolving oeuvre.