What does it mean to be an “artist?” Where do your ideas come from? How do you choose the best way to express those ideas? How do you respond as people react to your work? How does your work change over time? Explore these questions and more with artist Tony Tasset as you interact with him and works from his current exhibition All Things Must Pass now showing at Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis, Missouri. Designed to stimulate critical thinking about art and the artistic process, this program gives you a chance to go inside the mind of the artist as you react to Mr. Tasset’s works in the exhibition and explore the processes that created those works.According to the artist:
“My work is intended to speak to the widest possible audience. I tap into universal themes and emotions through common pictorial languages. To this end I employ familiarity, humor, craft, sentiment, confession and shock. I make iconic images about the current cultural moment from an individual perspective. I commonly deal with themes such as birth, death, family, nature, beauty, love, fear, loss, desire, the body, culture, politics, morality, irony, sincerity, and America. My practice makes use of many different mediums and styles. No medium is superior to another, but the choice of medium and style is meaningful. The idea driving each project dictates the material choice and presentation. I sample or am inspired by a broad array of sources, including: Michelangelo, Norman Rockwell, Bob Dylan, Process Art, Feminism, Cappucine Monks, Television Commercials, Nature, Catholicism, vernacular traditions and childhood memories. Some work employs my family or myself as subject. I blur distinctions between reality and fiction. I search for a meeting place between the intimacies of my life, my individuality and the zeitgeist of a populace. I critique my culture and myself. Artistic and moral positions are contextual. In my work, I attempt to reveal truth.”
Tony Tasset has been an important and influential conceptual artist since the mid 1980’s. We invite you and your students to join us for an hour of exciting discussion and exploration of the ideas expressed in Mr. Tasset’s artist statement for All Things Must Pass. Tied to Missouri Grade Level Expectations (GLEs) and National Standards in Visual Arts, this interactive program challenges students and teachers to explore their concepts of art as they engage with examples of Mr. Tasset’s provocative and evocative works.
Exhibition Description:
From October 6, 2007 through January 13, 2008, Laumeier Sculpture Park will present an important solo museum exhibition by internationally-recognized artist Tony Tasset. All Things Must Pass will fill Laumeier’s indoor galleries and extend to our outdoor galleries with a new, commissioned, monumental outdoor sculpture. The exhibition, the first to showcase Tasset’s work in St. Louis, will include selected works from the past decade, recent work, and new work. A broad range of media typical of Tasset’s practice—video, photography, and a variety of approaches to sculpture will be featured.
Tasset frequently uses his environment, his family and himself as subject and inspiration. His work, employing wisdom and wit, continuously contends with the trappings of modernism, postmodern theory, pop culture, and the human emotions associated with love, loss, frailty and beauty. In recent work he has turned to the dual nature of his own existence—an urban artist/public figure as well as a suburban-father-with-garden. Using this deeply personal source material, he creates objects and images that are at once ironic, earnest, and decidedly humanistic. Tasset describes his work as an exploration of the “conflicts of the ego and the difficulty in expressing certain sentiments in a postmodern environment where truth is relative, and in a culture of consumption where emotion is a commodity.”
Artist Information:
Tony Tasset received his BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati and his MFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago (1985). He is currently a professor of art and design at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Tasset has exhibited his work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; and Camerawork, London among others. He has lived and worked in Chicago for over fifteen years.
