5 Questions: Thomas Christopher Haag
Interview by Takeo Royer | December 1, 2021
The title of this exhibition is No Shade For The Shadow, can you speak about the progression of the shadow in this current body of work? And how it correlates to recent/past bodies of work?
The last few series have been more connected. “Coaxing the Shadow” was about getting the shadow out from its hiding places and into the open where we see it, the series directly after that was “Nomad”, about travel and movement, but it was also very literal, don't be mad at what you see once you pull it out of the shadows, it was about acceptance. With No Shade For The Shadow all the dark stuff has been pulled in the open and exposed to the light. The more honest we are, the less we have a need hide, so the shadow becomes less necessary. It's an extinction of the shadow; once the shadow becomes visible, it's not really a shadow anymore. The show is about integration. It feels like a refining series. I've stripped away appendages, narrative details, and anthropomorphic ideas - distilled it to a bare minimum of form and color.
This work in particular feels quite Mid-Century Modern. Where does that influence come from?
I was part of a gallery in downtown Albuquerque called Relic. It was my studio, gallery space. and a living showroom. We had a living room setup or a dining room setup with art on the walls all mid mid-century furniture - mostly Swedish – 50’s and 60’s stuff. I got a crash course in it and really enjoy that esthetic. It's understated, elegant, simple, and timely. The lines and the colors just started working their way into the work from there, but it's a color palette that I've been using for over a decade.
Your sculptural pieces all include objects you find. What’s your process in finding these objects?
I’m constantly looking at the ground, putting dirty shit in my pocket. I've been collecting things for 20 years for different projects, every single little piece I’ve found off the ground, from the beaches on the West Coast and railroad tracks, to the Bodhi Tree in India. There’s jewelry from my mom’s collection, and there are gold and precious metals that I mix with bottle caps and toys. As I got to be known as a collector of these things, friends would drop off bags of “garbage” that they thought I would like. Probably over 50% of it I've actually picked up and collected, but a growing percentage of it is donated by people from their junk drawers. It's a time capsule. It is what we've peppered the earth with. The transmutation process of turning something nobody wants into something that is esthetically pleasing infuses it with intentional value.
Why is it important to be an artist?
I’ve spent a lot of my life searching for the core, the essence, the perennial philosophy, and what it means to be spiritual. The holiest life I could imagine after a point was making art. You get to put your attention, focus, care in an object , which to me, equates to holiness. It’s the last vestige of a holy life.
What influences you? In life?
Consciousness studies are more important to me than in my artistic studies, even though they braid together and overlap. Art history is filled with questioning and exploring what it is to be human and what it is to have consciousness. Consciousness studies are my first study and art is the byproduct of that. It’s all a study, every piece of artwork I do is trying to figure out what some of those existential answers might actually look like.