Leslie Thornton

Toaster With, 2019

28 x 90 cm

Fine art print on Fuji Crystal Archive paper, mounted on aluminium
Unique

Refracted through archival material, texts, found footage and dense soundtracks, Leslie Thornton's rigorously experimental film and video work is an investigation into the production of meaning through media. A recurring strand of her work is the intersection between technology and subjectivity, and the complex ways in which they produce, shape, mirror and distort one another. Being interested in what the artist describes as the simultaneous presence of the “epic and the mundane,” she has a recurrent focus on tracing lines of connection between the everyday and a sense of vastness. This is a facet of Toaster With, a work of which the artist describes with the following words: “In the Toaster With series, I am making photo montages in which the image on left is always the same a constant. It is of an early form of toaster, a common appliance, but in its early form the danger of it is evident. It gets very hot; it no doubt started fires. But it is just a toaster. An old toaster. On the right I am developing a series of images drawn from across the history of aviation, up to the present. This covers broad territory, from the marvels of early flight to stealth aircraft and beyond. I grew up in a military/industrial complex family and we had a toaster and my father made a nuclear powered airplane. I am always walking between these spaces.“ Leslie Thornton (b. 1951, Knoxville, US) has held solo exhibitions at Secession, Vienna; Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (both 2018); Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (2016). Her work has been shown at Konsthall, Malmö (2019); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2018); the Whitney Biennale (2017) and Serpentine Gallery, London (2013). She lives in New York and Rhode Island.