Mixed-media assemblage artist Tom Tomlinson has lived in his 1907-built house in Sierra Madre since 1977. Perhaps this long tenure makes him an elder-guardian of sorts.
Tomlinson’s latest show, “Gather up the fragments: Assemblage by Tom Tomlinson” will be on view at the LMF Gallery and Darkroom through January 29. Gallery owner/curator Xrstine Franco says “In a strange twist of the universe, his show was set to open the day after the inception of the wildfires which came to practically the mouth of his neighborhood. We delayed the show until it was safe and made sense to open. We later realized the prescience and strangely appropriate name of his show.”
BTW, Franco explains the gallery’s name this way: “LMF stands for Language Mobilization Factory. All art is ‘Language.’ We ‘Mobilize’ it when we get it moving ti show and sell for the artist and the gallery, and the ‘Factory’ part represents a place to ‘Make,’ the forthcoming darkroom.”
As an experience, “Gather” mirthfully defies Marie Kondo, Martha Stewart, and generations of mothers telling kids to “clean up your room.” In fact, Tomlinson extends an invitation to Local News Pasadena readers: Reach out to him via the gallery before discarding any garage or storage stashes of potential treasure.
The artist is a dapper dude in a white, freshly ironed, pleated tuxedo shirt, sharp contrast to an otherwise well-weathered ensemble. At the opening last Saturday as we nibbled pineapple cubes and berries from the buffet, Tomlinson directed me through three pieces arranged together for the first time: “SAAR-RE HOMAGE,” “VIENNA 1971 FOUND OBJECT,” and “REISE #1.” While not conceived as a triad necessarily, these three installations in succession suggest some of the topography of Tomlinson’s inner landscapes.
The first is a tribute to the iconic Betye Saar. Tomlinson explains the hyphenate he’s added to her name – “-RE”—to mean “Anything can be revived, even that which is cancelled, lost and found.” He recalls that he felt “…awestruck…goosebumps…as though I were levitating…highly charged,” after leaving an exhibition of Saar’s work and spotting a scrap of street-flattened paper and metal on the sidewalk. The fragment reminded him of Saar’s montages, and he spirited the found morsel off to his studio to become the foundation of his own “SAAR-RE HOMAGE.”
The second stop, “VIENNA 1971 FOUND OBJECT” only hints at its identity through its naming. Eying the piece, Tomlinson says “My four-year-old son and I rescued this object in 1971 in Vienna. We pulled it out of a defunct railroad track, and it hung in our apartment in Vienna for years.”
The object is, well, the insides of an old piano, forever silenced, now hanging like the skeletonized remains of Grendel’s trophy-arm on the mead-hall wall. And to those of us so inclined, the chiaroscuro stretch of wires and hammers also suggests a Voudoun vibe, hailing from a culture where the orisha are summoned when metal enters wood.
The third item in the sequence is “REISE #1”, or Trip #1. “It’s intentional and rational, and fluid and static at the same time,” says Tomlinson, explaining that he painted some sections with tea, producing a vintage sepia feel behind a scrap of rusted screen. Bits of antimacassar doilies float like clouds across an uncertain horizon.
Tomlinson claims that his penchant for picking began in his Monrovia boyhood, where his filial duty of tossing the trash became a daily quest for beauty, mystery and wonder. He speaks of “…the forgiveness of wood. It tolerates so many insults, full cancellation. If I’m working with something and I don’t like the way the varnish is looking, I can sand it off and start over. Metal is much tougher. I feel like I can’t get rid of it, so I keep my distance.”
These musings seem especially salient as ash and soot continue to blow under our doors and through the spaces in our window casements with the January 29 approach of Year of the Wood Snake, the season of shedding, discarding and re-emerging in new skins.
A signature element of sorts is a cancelled French postage stamp from the turn of the last century. He acquired multiples of this stamp and others like it during an acute postcard-buying binge. Tomlinson has decided that the graceful figure depicted is “…Pomona, the Sower, goddess of the orchard,” also quite apropos to our region. This specific stamp, which he admires for the dynamic use of triangular space within the illustration’s outline, appears throughout many of the pieces here. Anna, Tomlinson’s seven-year old granddaughter, applied many of the stamps to the handles of brooms appearing in “FRANCE, MAY 1945.” Anna’s mother, Monrovia resident Arella Tomlinson, is an artist and art therapist, and has painted a portrait of him under the title “Angel of Rust.”
Simply put, this is art that’s been there. “I like stuff that has had experience,” says the artist.
An utterly motheaten, taxidermized parrot surveys a pair of Mary Jane shoes that belonged to Tomlinson’s sister as a child. A ridged metal toilet-float perches, a plumber’s diadem, atop an installation. Wooden fishing floats that Tomlinson collected between the ages of 5 to 12 are suspended like pendant jewels. Shotgun casings stand in as votive candles as a weepy BVM regards an especially tragic obituary for a woman named Mary Jo clipped from the Los Angeles Times, pasted in the upper right of the piece called “LACRIMOSA.”
Along with antlers, rusted screws, ceramic insulators, ancient screwdrivers, wires, an old suitcase handle and scraps of plastic, leather and linoleum, photographs of people the artist never met appear to have blown through life’s debris to land in some of these assemblages, just as we continue to find snapshots, notes, family mementoes and grocery lists from other households amidst the windy rubble of our lives.
Tomlinson muses over his “KONSTRUKTION WITH 28 GRACEFUL FRENCH WOMEN” as the opening-night crowd buzzes around him with increasing intensity.
He says to no one in particular, “I think it’s finished, but I’m not sure.”
Deets
- The LMF Gallery & Darkroom
- 55 North Baldwin Avenue, Sierra Madre 91024
- 909.788.0176
- www.thelmfla.org
- @thelmfla
