TOM DEININGER, Art at POP Emporium Curated by Marika van Vessem
219 West Park Street
Providence, RI 02908
Open Fridays through Sunday, 1-5 p.m.
Opening Reception, Friday, November 22 at 7 pm
Musical performances by SUSS and Museum Legs at 9 pm
You may have seen Tom Deininger’s artwork before: perhaps in a half-remembered retweet, or while scrolling through Instagram. The Tiverton-based artist is known for his illusionistic sculptures—sometimes small, other times massive, but usually made from colorful, discarded plastics and toys, their original forms visible only up close.
Now you’ll have the opportunity to see Deininger’s work in person, when Deininger’s work arrives at Providence’s POP Emporium with an opening reception on Friday, November 22, 2019 at 7 P.M. Musical guest SUSS will inaugurate the exhibit with a wave of “ambient country” at 9 p.m. on opening night.
Pop will present Deininger’s work across several different planes. You can expect a few sculptures, including a crow whose feathers, when scrutinized, reveal Arnold Schwarzenegger’s abs, a Ronald-McDonald-Yoda hybrid, and what Deininger calls “Darth Vader in drag,” all cohering into a dark “network of weirdness.”
Digital ‘portraits’ of thickly overlapped and fused imagery (a fundamental part of Deininger’s 2D oeuvre) will occupy an entire wall, providing plenty of opportunity to untangle their dense, fever-dream surfaces. Deininger will also share his risqué fabric patterns, which will likely be the lewdest upholstery you’ve ever seen.
What’s shared among these materially diverse works is Deininger’s simultaneous cynicism and curiosity. He seems astonished by the sheer amount of stuff (physical and subliminal) in the world. But he’s also driven by an obsessive desire to discover and dust off the new connections and layers that emerge when all this crap accumulates.
Still, discussing Deininger’s methods as ‘trash becomes art’ is too easy. That one would be surprised at trash turning into art, or vice versa, suggests a lack of familiarity with either. Deininger is indeed a recycler, rescuing objects from pointlessness and landfills. But the implied activism of that statement is perhaps outpaced by Deininger’s sincere interest in the nature of reality (or rather realities).
The exhibit contains a handful of large oil paintings, recently reworked by Deininger, that feature suggestive, glitch-like brushwork, melting figurations, strange palettes and all sorts of imagery and motifs mashed together. Congregated on a flat plane, these impressive (and never-before-exhibited) canvases speak to Deininger’s abilities of synthesis. They nod, grin and chuckle a little madly at the idea that truth is anything but fiction.
About the music
SUSS is a New York City based post-country, ambient Americana boot gazing, psychedelic band featuring Bob Holmes, Gary Leib, Jonathan Gregg, Pat Irwin and William Garrett (Rubber Rodeo, B-52’s, 8 eyed Spy, the Raybeats, Band Aparrt, the Crusty Gentlemen, RI Power Trio and the Combine).
As POP Matters states: “The “country ambient” sub-genre may be as niche as it can get, but there is no denying that SUSS are already the undisputed masters of the form.”
Museum Legs is “repetitive guitar music” from Providence, RI.