Few artists have a story like Thomas Barger. Raised on a cattle ranch farm in Illinois – about as rural as it gets in the Midwest – as a young gay man, he struggled to find his place in the conservative, religious community. He went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to study architecture and landscape architecture, which lead the 20-something artist to eventually move to New York.
It was in New York that Barger was able to free himself in order to see himself, both as an artist and a man. His sculptural, object-oriented works have always been tactile explorations of his younger years, a way to process the emotional and spiritual journey, and look back at how the rural environment shaped his queerness.
‘It’s a little funny what I thought was glam,’ Barger says, speaking of the inspiration for a series of new works that grapple with luxury and the domestic, part of an offsite exhibition staged by Salon 94 Design in collaboration with Supply Seoul. ‘As a child and even as a young adult in the Midwest, my understanding of luxury differs so much more to what I see as luxury nowadays, as an adult in New York,’ Barger, who now lives in Brooklyn, says. ‘My rural childhood memories of what luxury was seems frivolous and cute.’ But Barger’s perspective on luxury and materialism isn’t one of straight critique. He also locates the ‘richness in these found objects were the memories and relationships’.
Collaboration With Cousin, 2019, by Thomas Barger, paper pulp, plywood, wooden frame, polyurethane, and paint.
The show with Salon 94 Design (the artist’s second solo outing at the gallery) is called ‘Sugar Dish’, which to Barger means ‘confronting my relationship participating in a commercial market and reflecting on what luxury used to mean to me’. That is conveyed first in the materials Barger chooses, that create tension between ‘campy drag high and low, transforming paper from NYC streets and rocks from my creek into something desirable. It is this funny feeling of feeling like a fraud in this luxury market’.
The paper pulp sculptures he’s produced reference to specific items: Longaberger baskets, chairs, daybeds and sugar dishes, items he was once surrounded with and considered to be the pinnacle of high-end culture. Ornately and unashamedly decorative – Barger likes romantic details, art historical tropes like flowers, thorns, and snaked hearts – his objects are animated by their organic forms but a palette of pinks, reds, greens and black make them more like cartoon figures. Bendy, spiky and comical, Barger’s cast of former furniture items are not without humour or erotic charge either (there’s not many works that would look at home in torture garden and a kindergarten).
Look closely and some of Barger’s childhood memories are hinted at in the artwork titles: Do You Wish I Was A Mackintosh asks one high-backed chair, painted black. Dicks Creek Hereford hints another. Each object is like a diary entry, Barger looking at the personal through the prism of design. Craft, memory and queerness are all themes Barger has touched on in the past but these new works see him ‘diving deeper’ – truth they say is, after all, sweet like sugar.
Ornament Is A Shaker Crime, 2019, by Thomas Barger, paper pulp, plywood, wooden frame, chair, polyurethane, and paint.
Recall A Memory, It Fades, 2019, by Thomas Barger, paper pulp, plywood, wooden frame, polyurethane, and paint.
Do You Wish I Was A Mackintosh, 2019, by Thomas Barger, paper pulp, plywood, wooden frame, polyurethane, and paint.
Backpacking Across Doodle Dandee, 2019, by Thomas Barger.
Click, 2019, by Thomas Barger.
Dicks Creek Hereford, 2019, by Thomas Barger.
Letting Go, Not Moving On, 2019, by Thomas Barger, paper pulp, wooden frame, wood, rattan, polyurethane, and paint.
INFORMATION
‘Sugar Dish’, until 15 August, Salon 94 Design. salon94design.com
ADDRESS
Supply Seoul
B1, Seongsu il ro 9
Seongdong gu
Seoul
-
Go back to the future with Marty McFly’s calculator watch, marking the film’s 40th anniversaryCasio will release a special-edition watch to mark Back to the Future Day on 21 October
-
Brompton splices power with lightness in the new Electric T Line, a featherweight e-bikeThe cult of Brompton will garner many new recruits thanks to the ultra-sophisticated, titanium-framed Electric T Line, announced today
-
Somerset restaurant Osip sets the table for a different kind of art showChef Merlin Labron-Johnson’s Michelin-starred restaurant hosts an artist-in-residence exhibition exploring form, materiality and the poetics of place
-
Jamel Shabazz’s photographs are a love letter to Prospect ParkIn a new book, ‘Prospect Park: Photographs of a Brooklyn Oasis, 1980 to 2025’, Jamel Shabazz discovers a warmer side of human nature
-
The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles launches the seventh iteration of its highly anticipated artist biennialOne of the gallery's flagship exhibitions, Made in LA showcases the breadth and depth of the city's contemporary art scene
-
Thomas Prior’s photography captures the uncanny fragility of American lifeA new book unites two decades of the photographer’s piercing, uneasy work
-
Central Park’s revitalised Delacorte Theater gears up for a new futureEnnead Architects helmed an ambitious renovation process that has given the New York City cultural landmark a vibrant and more accessible future
-
Stephen Prina borrows from pop, classical and modern music: now MoMA pays tribute to his performance work‘Stephen Prina: A Lick and a Promise’ recalls the artist, musician, and composer’s performances, and is presented throughout MoMA. Prina tells us more
-
Curtains up, Kid Harpoon rethinks the sound of Broadway production ‘Art’He’s crafted hits with Harry Styles and Miley Cyrus; now songwriter and producer Kid Harpoon (aka Tom Hull) tells us about composing the music for the new, all-star Broadway revival of Yasmina Reza’s play ‘Art’
-
Richard Prince recontextualises archival advertisements in TexasThe artist unites his ‘Posters’ – based on ads for everything from cat pictures to nudes – at Hetzler, Marfa
-
The best Ruth Asawa exhibition is actually on the streets of San FranciscoThe artist, now the subject of a major retrospective at SFMOMA, designed many public sculptures scattered across the Bay Area – you just have to know where to look
