Taryn Tomasello: As Long As It Doesn’t Spread
Taryn Tomasello: As Long As It Doesn’t Spread
In this Culture of Excess, the idea of productivity no longer makes sense. How and why do we make more, do more, act more? We make work, acting on the impulse to appear necessary even when our actions are redundant. When laziness is considered a flaw and hard work a virtue, the goal seems clear, but we are already witnessing the results of this constant striving for growth. A sunset clause is an agreed upon point of expiration for a set of conditions…What does the sunset clause for this period of intense production look like?
In anticipation of our entry into a Dark Ages -a dormant period for this culture and its technologies- this work takes core samples of domestic labor and excess. These are living biospheres of the filth, the home, childhood, pets and cooking. The DNA of a family unit, their guests, and their waste are held, hermetically sealed, and contained in sedimentary stratum. There are fights, broken mementos, tendernesses, tears, failures, birthday parties…This is a form of refusal. This is an offering. Everyday the floor is cleared and its contents preserved.
If we, as artists, are producers of culture, then it is our imperative to resist working, to stop enacting and perpetuating an aesthetic of fear. Fear of invisibility. Fear of irrelevance. This is a form of making that looks toward accountability for what we have done, what we have made.
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Taryn Tomasello is a living artist who works with what life gives her.
Taryn Tomasello: Variable West