My eyeballs are the same size as your eyeballs

"Mommy, you know what? My eyeballs are the same size as your eyeballs." That's what Grant said to me tonight, while I waited for him to fall asleep after hours at the Natural History Museum, followed by train track building, a little baking, and a late night biking riding excursion. I'm trying to squeeze in final details on my show, mostly in the evening hours, before going to Ohio on Friday.

The dog days of August hang in this household. Until September 8th and full-time on September 14th, I'm running a homeschool for a child whose eyeballs are as big as mine. Below the press release...

Drawing on the Utopic

STOREFRONT (16 Wilson Avenue, Brooklyn) is pleased to present Drawing on the Utopic: A Solo Exhibition of Drawings and Text Pieces by Austin Thomas. An opening reception for the artist will be Friday, September 17 from 6-9PM. Storefront is open weekends 1-6PM or by appointment by calling 646-361-8512.

Austin Thomas's collages, deceptively delicate studies, caught sometimes in the act of unfolding against or through the gridded skin of a graph paper background, explore enduring thoughts about the speciation of drawing and sculpture.

Thomas’s varied performative actions and artworks may be broadly described as delineating and creating “social sculpture.” In homage to Joseph Beuys’s famous formulation and the idea that social systems add up to (or can be rearranged to constitute) one great work of art, her practice has included “Perches” (hybrid sculptural/architectural objects around which events are created); an artist-run gallery in Bushwick; a traveling El Camino that provided a moving space for lectures about art; and many other public actions that have created spontaneous communities around art, discussion, and most recently a camp for kids and adults.

Thomas’s text pieces punctuate this varied practice by adding a relational narrative of overheard public conversations. In Thomas's works sense falls apart just when it begins to fall together–they're sketches of the way life is, as organisms (like us) negotiate their desires across the permeable borders of being. In one of her blog posts Thomas writes, “Next up, experiments in and with new and different, reformed, informed and all encompassing forms of selfhood (folded, presented, performed, baked, butted, and drawn crooked).” -- written with the helpful words of Douglas Max Utter and Molly Larkey