Exhibition Dates: September 28 - November 4

Artist’s Statement

I create work through the act of mediation. I define mediation as a medium parallel to that of language. Like language, mediation is a system correlated to other systems we use when remembering events, telling stories, organizing and sharing information. I reconfigure and deconstruct technologies that operate as familiar interfaces in our daily lives in order to investigate the distinctions we make between truth and fiction, the genuine article and the simulation. I’m interested in the margins of ambiguity that remain unfixed in our basic attempts to define the rationale of a system, or to clearly map a perceptual hierarchy. 

Provisional Connectionsis comprised of work that attempts to equate experience to a system of formal and medium-based choices. The distance between the actual and the simulation enables me to play with the perceptual qualifications for the temporal, the pragmatic, the emotional, and the physical realms of life. Through my work, I create a space in which familiar cultural, environmental, and personal memories are embodied in the guises of screens, projections, surveillance and documentary. 

Derek Toomes Bio

Derek Toomes is an artist who currently works at the UNC Greensboro, as the Digital Director for the Art and IARC Departments. He received his MFA in Studio Art from UNCG in 2018. Over the past decade, Derek has exhibited widely and lived as a practicing artist in both Los Angeles, CA, and Raleigh, NC. Well known for his paintings and collaborative murals, his past work fluidly moved between the realms of graffiti and pop. More recently, his work is characterized by his use of new media in combination with installation, light, sound, and kinetics. He has shown frequently and recently at LUMP Gallery in Raleigh, North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, SECCA in Winston Salem, the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh, and Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill, NC.