Tom McDermott is a current resident artist at the Hive Gallery in Los Angeles and graduated with a degree in Fine Arts at the University of California San Diego. He currently participates in various exhibitions throughout Los Angeles.
McDermott has worked across disciplines having focused on performance, sound based art, video and collage. His conceptual works often analyze post-forms, deconstruction/re-construction and the ‘flaw’ or ‘glitch’ as an aesthetic item. In June of 2011, one of Tom McDermott’s past SoundWalk projects, the Listening Glass was exhibited at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art during their Summer Salon Series.
For SW2012 Description, is a collaborative matter, forged by bonding the various vocal communications of artists’ to a digital c.c. Each artists’ mouth-noises have converged upon a relayed analysis of a supposed “art work”. The purity of some records have been convoluted through selected efforts of editing on the part of this “artist,” while other tracks remain unspoiled. Description in this work, is created to be extracted from the actual art object, to become the primary medium. Praise, “trash-talking”, voiced opinions, wordy lectures and art reviews, can all become a prompt in perceiving art – in the same way that this project summary is meant to guide a spectator’s thoughts. This piece is meant to both lightheartedly mock the certain excess description that is sometimes encountered in the art world, and is simultaneously my own critical analysis of the transformation of art through description.
For SW2012 McDermott’s presents Sound Collage. The sound collages will be a reconstructed dialog that is created by using samples taken from various songs. Each sound collage will be played from a speakers hidden behind either a blank canvas, or empty frame.