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About
Thomas Lail exhibits widely and is represented by One Mile Gallery. Lail performs and records with the experimental-music project soundBarn. He has published numerous reviews and essays including two catalogue essays on the work of Robert Longo and publishes poetry and experimental writing through soundBarn Press.
About the work
Formatively exposed to both the work of the Pictures Generation and the material politics of the Arte Povera artists, Thomas Lail appropriates fragments of images that look to idealized communities, protests, Edenic floral patterns, flags, and maps. These readymade pictures, often reproduced to degraded obscurity, find form in the common, cast-off materials of our everyday.
In rag-picking images and materials of late-capitalism, Lail's works are ad-hoc banners and standards to be raised by post-peak castaways. Both anxious projections of the boundaries we draw across pictures-of-the-world and repeated hopes in our moment of global-weirding, Lail's work suggests our struggle to envision and depict our world, its developing state, and our once-dreamed-futures now encircled by rising tides and viral beachheads.