Steven Thompson’s Death Plaid, installed at English Kills gallery.Stephen Truax for BushwickBK
The surprisingly quiet and effeminate exhibition currently on view at English Kills strikes a chord of interior monologue, introspection, and private rumination. Compared to the rest of the gallery’s program, Steven Thompson’s highly aesthetic sculptures of light blue and delicate, semiprecious objects was a noticeable departure. The viewer feels as though he is intruding on an intimate psychological space.
On the Internet, there is little to no documentation of Thompson’s work up to this point. His on-and-off relationship with the New York art world leaves little public record of his lifelong artistic efforts, and thus, walking into English Kills on Beat Nite, it appeared as though Thompson had dropped into New York out of thin air, a highly sophisticated and personal conceptual artist.
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Thompson (b. Locust Hill, South Carolina, 1969) received his MFA from the University of Georgia, where he studied with Jim Herbert – alongside BFA-candidate Andy Piedilato – and went on to teach there from 2004 through 2007. All three now show at English Kills Art Gallery in Bushwick. For the past four years, he has lived and worked in Williamsburg, but his relationship with New York began in the early 1990s.
The imperious, quasi-religious costume made of white wool felt and hand-made white ceramic buttons, Ghost Suit (2004), included in the show, was exhibited the New York Armory in 2004 with since defunct Kenny Schachter Contemporary. The piece, among others, was made with the assistance of Steven Thompson’s collective of artists and friends – which he organized – called Green and Bold Cooperative.
Thompson holds an honorary degree in Classical Languages from Charleston College, which accounts for his strange German and Latin titles. Pommern ist Abgebrannt, "Pommern is burned down," colloquially meaning, "it’s all over," refers to a small coastal town on the Baltic Sea in Northeastern Germany which was destroyed during the Thirty Years War, an event popularized in a contemporaneous German children’s song with the same title. The ancient Latin motto Murus Esto, "be thou a wall," appears on many Scottish and English Coats of Arms, and is referred to in Colossians 2:6. Both texts appear in Thompson’s drawings written in his signature script adopted from the obscure and experimental post-Punk band The Residents’ 1979 album cover for Eskimo.
The bottom-heavy and very Motown 70s-chic script appears throughout the exhibition, including a fluorescent paint pen tag on the largest sculpture, Nomadic Desk (1997-ongoing). The large sculpture is four hand-made balsa wood desks protruding from a theatrical hand-painted "rock" also made of wood, which juts out from the floor at a jagged angle. The desks feature hundreds of tiny objects, ranging from a taxidermied raven, to a human skull, to tiny pipe shafts Thompson carved by hand and arranged into patterns. Thompson’s thoughtful installations create an environment all their own, referencing installation artists such as Sarah Sze and Mark Dion, both represented by Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.
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Materiality is circumvented throughout the exhibition, where composites, decoys and approximations of semiprecious materials like Baltic amber, Turkish meerschaum, ebony, and lodestone – a natural magnet – are created by hand by the artist using surprising and creative self-invented techniques and are exhibited alongside the originals. Each of these ideal materials is taken from classic smoking pipe construction – the kind Sherlock Holmes puffs on.
These materials are repeated in the related sculpture, Death Plaid, which takes its title from the Tarot card Thompson is given most frequently during readings: Death. The classic back of the cards are a light-blue plaid pattern Thompson color-copied hundreds of times at lifesize scale to achieve the wall-size double-oval shape constructed entirely of these copies. The card – Death – and the fact that they’re Tarot at all, is hidden from the viewer.
Thompson is a member of the Fluorescent Minerals Society and took the time to show me – using his high and low-wave UV lights – how most of his artworks literally glow in the dark. This unveiling of hidden complexity, through turning the lights off, was indicative of Thompson’s entire practice. On the surface, his drawings and sculptures are intriguing arrangements of strange objects not unlike an 18th-century Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities, legitimately beautiful in their own right. But upon deeper investigation, they reveal their hidden visual and conceptual content.
Issues of authenticity and theatricality are addressed by the large installations which simultaneously present "real" things – a large, intimidatingly expensive piece of amber, or a real Turkish pipe – and their convincing counterfeits. The added density of the post-apocalyptic world in which Germanic tribes, not unlike the Tartans, reemerge, and are forced to cooperate together in a peaceful second ice age is unnecessary to appreciate the work, yet it is refreshing to scratch the surface of a Bushwick show and find so much content submerged underneath a seemingly simple veneer. Steven Thompson’s sculptures embody an incredible amount of complexity and depth.
