HANK WILLIS THOMAS
Looking for America (2018)
Patina Bronze, 164.6 x 239 x 140.2 cm
Photography is also a point of departure for Thomas’ works in other media. Here Thomas has isolated a photographic detail from a news or archival image, made it three dimensional, and cast it in bronze, as one would typically use in casting a public statue or monument.
The “punctum”, a term originated by philosopher Roland Barthes, refers to that precise detail in a photograph that sticks in your mind. It is this, the most important communicative device in a photograph, that Thomas transforms into realistic, fully dimensional sculpture.
Photograph by Danny Lyon of Clifford Vaughs arrested by the National Guard at a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) protest in Cambridge, Maryland in 1964. In foreground, Stokely Carmichael pulls Vaughs' right leg from Guardsmen. [1][2]
In the human-scale work “Looking For America”, a complete figure of a man is being pulled in four directions by disembodied arms of National Guard soldiers and Civil Rights protesters, a composition taken from a photograph by Danny Lyon in 1964. In “Strike”, based on a 1935 lithograph by Louis Lozowick depicting an encounter between a protester and a policeman, a disembodied arm raised up and wielding a nightstick is grasped at the wrist by another hand, the forearms forming a triangular geometry. This piece, made of gleaming stainless steel with a mirrored finish, resembles a trophy. In these works too, the intentional ambiguity, the incompleteness of the disembodied figures, leaves viewers the opportunity to find meaning in their own questions about what it is they are seeing.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Hank (b. 1976 Plainfield, NJ) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY as a conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to perspective, identity, commodity, media, and popular culture.