Tom Butler
I am fascinated by the twin human desires to hide and perform.
In a visual way, I collect memories, thresholds, and hiding
places and attempt to remanufacture them. My work expresses
my natural inclination toward introversion and the opposition of
publicly displaying artwork essentially about hiding—a process I
call “conspicuous invisibility.”
For the last four years, I have been appropriating anonymous
photographs, etchings, and postcards and painting personal
symbols such as hair, hoods, and masks in gouache on their
surfaces. In doing so, I reveal aspects of the imagined inner
personality of the sitter while cloaking it with parts of myself. I
use these portraits as psychological clotheshorses on which to
create grotesque and sinister scenarios, enabling me to project
thoughts, fears, and anxieties in an immediate and direct way,
often with a macabre sense of humor.
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