Artists

Chiffon Thomas

Press release

Chiffon Thomas’s practice is an interdisciplinary one, ranging across hand embroidered mixed media painting, collage, drawing, and sculpture. Identifying as a trans queer person of color, Thomas’ powerful figurative assemblages examine the difficulties faced by defining one’s identity in contemporary society. Through contorted figures and fractured compositions that float seamlessly between historical and contemporary styles and references, Thomas portrays a form of self-expression that puts human touch at the forefront of his art. Reminiscent of the diverse, mixed media practices exhibited by Robert Rauschenberg, Faith Ringgold and David Hammons, Thomas’ own application of materiality becomes a language for translating cultural references and personal experiences. Raised with a strong religious upbringing, Thomas’ work often grapples with conflicting beliefs, values, and desires, primarily using tactile methods of hand embroidery, collaged found material and paint to perform as an expressive visual language that interprets personal feelings of nostalgia, longing to belong, and affirmations of self-identity. Scenes from family photographs are deconstructed into sketches and then built back up with colorful fibers, stitch by stitch. A sense of texture and dimensionality is achieved through the varying weights of thread, which are sometimes densely layered and other times sparse. Domestic scenes appear to shift in and out of focus, resulting in visceral collisions of abstraction and clarity that invite viewers to decode the fraught relations between memory and reality, visibility and understanding.