Chiffon Thomas 

Selected Works

Progeny

Michael Kohn Gallery is pleased to announce Progeny, an exhibition of new works by Los Angeles-based artist Chiffon Thomas. For his second exhibition with the gallery, Thomas will present a group of monumental architectural sculptures, a body of work continuing from his recent solo exhibition, The Cavernous, at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT. This series will be his latest presentation in Los Angeles since his participation in the Hammer Museum’s biennial Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living. The exhibition will be on view from June 20 through August 17, 2024.

At the core of the exhibition are two monumental concrete obelisks inverted to place the stability of the structures onto a spillage of life-casted cascading feet, replicated and amalgamated together to behave as a dense, impenetrable element. Casted by Thomas himself, the anonymous appendages act as signifiers for overall forms, and memorialize the labor of precursors and histories unknown. In this approach to stabilization, Thomas addresses the precarious nature of humanity, while also representing ancestral strength, legacy and endurance of life among marginalized groups by referencing existing contemporaries.

Other works in the exhibition expand on Thomas’ pursuit of representing “impossible bodies.” Influenced by the evolution of biomimicry, he constructs free-standing pyramids from anatomical forms that render as ancient structures. The biomorphic sculptures tether stained glass with sutured skin; a post-human symbiosis of the organic and inorganic that recall Thomas’ fascination with ecclesiastical imagery. Citing Martin Puryear’s bulbous forms and Louise Bourgeois’ merging of homes with human forms, Thomas states: “I want skin to perform as architecture, and architecture to perform something bodily.”

Chiffon Thomas’ explorative practice encompasses embroidery, collage, sculpture, drawing, performance, and installation. Amy Smith-Stewart, Curator at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, elaborates on Thomas’ interdisciplinary approach to his work in a recent publication: “…interrogating a legacy of colonization, Black injustice, and classism in the US, Thomas entwines matters resonant with personal and collective histories of trauma and repair, as well as resilience and transformation.” In his 2021 exhibition with the gallery, Antithesis, Thomas used figurative assemblages to interpret feelings of nostalgia, metamorphosis, and decay; this new body of work is not so much a departure, but rather an enunciation of the artist’s practice as a sculptor.

Since opening his first show with Michael Kohn Gallery three years ago, Thomas has been featured in a solo exhibition at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and the Hammer Biennial Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living. In 2022, he was awarded the Joan Mitchell Fellowship. Thomas’ work is in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; and Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; among others.

Selected Press

About the Artist

Born and raised in Chicago, IL, Chiffon Thomas received his MFA in Painting from Yale University in 2020 and his BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014. Thomas is the recent recipient of the Joan Mitchell Fellowship and the Fountainhead Residency. Recent exhibitions include Antithesis, Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2021); Staircase to the Rose Window, P.P.O.W., New York, NY (2022); Dreaming of Home, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York, NY (2023); Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2023); and his first solo museum exhibition Chiffon Thomas: The Cavernous, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; Norton Museum, West Palm Beach, FL; Speed Museum of Art, Louisville, KY; Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH; and X Museum, Beijing, China; among others.

Thomas’s practice is an interdisciplinary one, ranging across hand embroidered mixed media painting, collage, drawing, and sculpture. Through contorted figures and fractured compositions that float seamlessly between historical and contemporary styles and references, Thomas portrays a form of self-expression that puts human touch at the forefront of his art. Reminiscent of the diverse, mixed media practices exhibited by Robert Rauschenberg, Faith Ringgold and David Hammons, Thomas’ own application of materiality becomes a language for translating cultural references and personal experiences. Raised with a strong religious upbringing, Thomas’ work often grapples with conflicting beliefs, values, and desires, primarily using tactile methods of hand embroidery, collaged found material and paint to perform as an expressive visual language that interprets personal feelings of nostalgia, longing to belong, and affirmations of self-identity. Scenes from family photographs are deconstructed into sketches and then built back up with colorful fibers, stitch by stitch. A sense of texture and dimensionality is achieved through the varying weights of thread, which are sometimes densely layered and other times sparse. Domestic scenes appear to shift in and out of focus, resulting in visceral collisions of abstraction and clarity that invite viewers to decode the fraught relations between memory and reality, visibility and understanding.

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