by Tom Estes 






 

Browsing Archive: June, 2012

Swampy- Venice Flooded!

Posted by Tom Estes on Friday, June 8, 2012, In : Venice Biennale 



 Venice is flooded

Swampy: Venice is Flooded - Live Art Guerrilla Action as part of 'Bizzare Artist Happenings' with The Biennial Project  (as featured by Tate Shots at The 54th  Venice Bienniale) 


 

On the 7th of  June 2011, the waters of the lagoon rose up and flooded Venice. As the waters rose, a strange creature appeared out of nowhere, and climbed the steps up from the Lagoon and entered the Giardini while the Venice Biennale was taking place... 




Through the Live Art Performance 'Swampy', ar...
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Night Cleaning at Elevator Gallery

Posted by Tom Estes on Thursday, June 7, 2012, In : Night Cleaning 


 Night Cleaning at 'Vanishing Point' at Elevator Gallery
from Friday the 29th of October until the 14th of November 2010.

For most artists, presence of an identifiable artwork be it object or sound, is of utmost importance, but for Vanishing Point the curators have invited artists to make work that is either hidden, discreet, or at the cusp of vanishing. The white walled space of the gallery appears at first glance to be just itself; an empty white space, but it houses the work of 50 contempora...
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Sewing Performance Tate Moder

Posted by Tom Estes on Thursday, June 7, 2012, In : Sewing Performance 


 
 Tom Estes in Sewing Performance for The Really, Really Free Market (RRFM), a 3-day market organised as Post-Museum's contribution to No Soul for Sale: A Festival of Independents, held in Tate Modern.

"This sewing performance was intended as a viral extension of a performance created as the culmination of a residency at Trinity Buoy Wharf. The work was conceived in relation to the site of Trinity Buoy Wharf- a place of both extreme poverty and extreme wealth; of crumbling and overgrown Docks,...
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'Night Cleaning' at Rhizomatic

Posted by Tom Estes on Thursday, June 7, 2012, In : Night Cleaning 


   

On Friday the 8th of October, 2010 Tom Estes staged the Performance 'Night Cleaning' at the Departures Gallery as part of the exhibition Rhizomatic. In this performance Estes mops the floor of the gallery while wearing a pair of pjamas.

Rhizomatic is an experimental, decentralised curatorial system based on the concept of the Rhizome, as explored in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical masterpiece A Thousand Plateaus. This is Departure Gallery’s largest and most ambitious show so far an...
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Tom Estes Drink & Dial Hotline at WW Gallery

Posted by Tom Estes on Thursday, June 7, 2012, In : Drink & Dial Hotline 


The work of artist Tom Estes at WW Gallery Drink & Dial exhibition 27 Mar - 6 May 2010


 For the WW Gallery Artist Tom Estes created a Drink and Dial Hotline complete with printed cards to hand out and telephone line to call. Estes' DRINK & DIAL HOTLINE  taps into the talismanic use of the mobile phone that expresses a feeling of both sentimental and implicitly magical: the attempt to contact or lay claiim to another space, another reality. As they say "Many a true word is spoken in jest" and i...
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Tom Estes' video Bake'in for Testbed 1 at Beaconsfield

Posted by Tom Estes on Tuesday, June 5, 2012,


  
 


Tom Estes' video Bake'in was shown on April 11th, 2010, as an interventionist critique at the closing event for RELLA, an event organised as part of Testbed 1 at Beaconsfield.
 
At this event Estes' contribution was this video performance of himself baking a cake while watching the film, The Exorcist. The work was shown on a loop, and through a conversation with co-curators Michael Curran and Lucy Gunning it was decided to stage the work in Canteen Gallery 2 so that visitors invited to the e...
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'Rejuvenation' by Tom Estes at The Whitechapel Gallery

Posted by Tom Estes on Tuesday, June 5, 2012,
In 2008 Estes premiered his work 'Rejuvenation'' at The RVC exhibition 'Lust & Luxuria' as part of The Whitechapel Gallery, Late Nghts. 



 'Rejuvenation'' is a 'found object' originally marketed under the aegis of 'Health and Beauty'. While the face of the mask exhibits a kind of hieratic calm, on the back are tiny metal nodules that send electric currents into the face of the wearer. Estes has further highlighted the sado-masochistic element of the object by displaying it in a slightly downwar...
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Gallery Interaction by Tom Estes at The De La Warr Pavilion

Posted by Tom Estes on Friday, June 1, 2012, In : Gallery Interaction 




Tom Estes ~ Gallery interaction~ The De La Warr Pavilion, 29th of August, 2010

"I have been collecting newspaper articles for about twenty years. Basically it’s a bit autobiographical as the collection is made up of things I have found of interest or things that I like or think are funny. I use to put them into drawers and then bin liners but now I have so many clippings now that I have started to put them into ring binder folders with plastic sleeves. I guess it probably seems a bit mad, as...
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Sewing Performance at Trinity Buoy Wharf

Posted by Tom Estes on Friday, June 1, 2012, In : Sewing Performance 

 Tom Estes in Sewing Performance, Trinity Buoy Wharf



"This ‘Sewing Performance’ was created as the culmination of a residency at Trinity Buoy Wharf. In this work I gently embroider leaves and vines onto a bespoke or tailor- made suit, causing a dimpling of the material. This sewing has the effect of slowly shrivelling the arms and legs of the suit. So in a way the work is really about being powerless in the face of exploitation and is intended to accentuate a core of wordless confusion and...
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Yogurt Weaving by Tom Estes

Posted by Tom Estes on Friday, June 1, 2012, In : Yogurt Weaving 



 
Performance: Yogurt Weaving

Tom Estes’ Performance ‘Yogurt Weaving’ took place on a small hill called 'Dr. Watt’s Mound', the exact same spot where Isaac Watts, recognised as the "Father of English Hymnody" wrote many of his famous hyms (17 July 1674 – 25 November 1748).

Dr. Watts Mound
Isaac Watts was the first prolific and popular English hymnwriter, credited with some 750 hymns. Sacred music scholar Stephen Marini (2003) describes the ways in which Watts contributed to English hymn...

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Performance


Tom Estes As an artist I have always leaned toward making Live Art performance work that is participatory or immersive in some way. In my Live Art performance I stage an 'action' and then ask members of the audience to take pictures on a communal camera. In this way, the audience becomes part of the performance, and the pictures are then posted on on-line social networking sites and web sites for another, wider on-line audience. For me, fantasy and illusion are not contradictions of reality, but instead an integral part of our everyday lives. There is a real Peter Pan Syndrome at play in my work and I suppose I would consider myself to be a carnival sideshow conceptualist, combining a bare-bones formal conceptualism with an eternally adolescent, prank DIY comic-approach. At the core of this work is an attention to the flickering, fading definition of our lives as dictated by the computer monitor and the rapid reply of instant messaging. I strive, not to break down these introverted, often self-imposed boundaries, but to look at how dataflow from the virtual realm impacts on the significance and symbolism of real-world human senses. But in doing so, I have begun to generate unexpected questions about how art might be able to inscribe itself on the surface of reality- not to represent itself on the surface of reality –not to represent reality, nor to duplicate it, but to replace it.

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