“Projects that include flaccid baseball bats connected to motion sensors and electric motors, or miniature sculptures of The Jolly Green Giantess babysitting a little man, illustrate attempts to facilitate ironic disruptions of current manifestation of a pastoral American dream and normative power dynamics. Experiences such as working as a professional landscaper and being a fan of major league baseball help me seed efforts to cultivate a pragmatic approach of balancing the utility and contradictions of garden variety vocabularies with an adaptive awareness to changing meaning.

 

“While working in construction, I picked up some of the basic tenets of household plumbing from one of my coworkers named Victor Jacobo: “1. Shit rolls downhill; 2. Payday is on Friday; 3. Plumbers Rule the World”. On one hand, these statements may be crude and slightly humorous, while on the other hand, they not only describe some important facts of life for almost all plumbers (except the astronauts who maintain the international space station), but they map out a profound way of looking at many aspects of life that extend far beyond plumbing. I attempt to implement some of the poetry of Victor’s statements that I see as so elegantly combing pragmatism and idealism, utility with poetry, realism and fantasy, science and religion, humor and seriousness. The apparent incongruity of the image of plumbers as world leaders coexists with the pragmatic necessity of water and waste systems that support essential biological needs and thus entire ecologies and social structures.

 

“I tinker with both contemporary and traditional cultural iconography and fabrication processes in a way that might undermine the rigid authority of certain tropes, while retaining some of the affect of importance that objects like life-sized figurative sculptures convey. Humor facilitates profound approaches to undermining pretentiousness and expressing humility, and the irony of publicly expressing humility in unqualified statements reflects the process of constantly readjusting within changing circumstances.

 

“My embrace of certain low-brow aesthetics in the form of scatological references or the overt use of puns can operate on multiple levels. Viewers are free to read certain pieces as a visualization of a linguistic pun or a bathroom joke. On the other hand, puns exemplify the flexibility of words and their virtual relationship to external reality, or in the case of Malebox, they may convey metaphors for stereotypes involving gender and communication.

 

“The apparent contradiction involved in asserting the power of my creative expression to critically examine the absurd sources of my own white male privilege, baseball fandom, and intellectual pretentiousness relates to an interest in nuanced expressions and unsynthesized conversations. I think of my work as a playful yet rigorous exploration of serious topics, justified play, or maybe just play.”

 

For more information, please visit thomaspstoeckinger.com .