Painter Thomas Weaver's artistic vision is focused on the American home as "psychologically charged terrain where dramas play themselves out on domestic stages." He realizes his vision vividly in, "Falling and Floating," an exhibition of thirty paintings that opens Thursday, June 12, at the Thomas J. Walsh Art Gallery at Fairfield University's Quick Center for the Arts. There will be an opening reception in the gallery from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. The exhibition runs through Thursday, July 31. Admission is free.

In his work, Weaver employs the nominal action both literally and figuratively. He explains, "The title of the show, 'Falling and Floating,' refers both to particular imagery in my paintings - of figures floating, walking or falling through wallpaper-patterned grounds - and to a state of reverie evoked" by the physical and psychological manifestations of the actual sensations that accompany falling and floating.

Curator of the exhibition and Fairfield University Professor of Studio Art Jo Yarrington describes her experience when viewing Weaver's compelling work thus, "One is apt to feel eerily suspended in that liminal space between dreaming and waking. Strange monochromatic and multi-colored arenas take shape and then seem to disappear. Shadowy figures appear in spaces, but don't quite take form and end up acting more like sign posts that mark the way to the next beyond - another drawing? another state of being?"

Independent Curator Matthew Garrison eloquently expressed great insight when he wrote in Crave catalogue, "Weaver's circuitry of images deprives his audience of any closure but, instead, speaks to the possibility of deferred satisfaction through the employment of fluctuating, nonlinear storylines and associations." As Weaver interprets the philosophical approach to his work he speaks of balancing "qualities of spontaneity and compulsiveness" and of the contradictions that result from the compounding of multi-leveled awareness "suspended together without resolution," the latter of which he sees as perhaps being "the source of energy for the work."

Yarrington's analysis of Weaver's work concurs with the artist's assessment of the positive effect ambiguity plays in his art's impact on the viewer. She cites as an example, a discovered detail: "Perforations in the paper move through figure and ground introducing multiple dimension both physically and metaphorically. One is caught in the whirl of Weaver's internal cosmology and left, as when waking from a deep sleep, to find clarity on the cusp of a vast, ephemeral journey."

Derived from reverie, Weaver's work reflects his inspiration by such psychologically charged artists as "the nightmarish visions of Fuseli, the empty cityscapes of Giorgia Di Chirico and the stressed landscapes of Edvard Munch." He has also been influenced by the modern work of R. Crumb and Charles Addams.

His creative process is one in which, "I search for an imagery and pictorial space that communicates states of introspection, absorption, isolation, reverie and loss of control ... I try to maintain an open and flexible approach in the studio that encourages my experience of these states as I work and I look for images that embody these states." His imagery "is never anecdotal" and manifests itself without the need to occupy literal place or time.

The gallery summer hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 12 Noon to 4 p.m. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Posted On: 05-28-2008 10:05 AM

Volume: 40 Number: 270