Kurt Tomerlin
About
- I draw with hammers that are meant to pound, holding loosely to hand tools which should be firm gripped. I reorient myself to possibility, asking the tool how to make a mark. In this renegotiation of the power between us, I disassemble the relationship between thinker/doer and inhibit the simple syntax of a handyman truism: “A man with a strong arm ought to learn to hit the nail on the head.”
-
Through an expansive amateur carpentry practice, I gauge my proximity to the men from my construction guides. Engaged in the performance, on the precipice of touch. I observe and rebuild the didactic images of the laborers, frozen in time and absent in their momentum. So, I work them: in prints, paintings, drawings -- with gesture, marks, tool, and machines. I reenact them, haphazardly dancing the constructed stances that the handymen perform for the viewer. My annotations below a narrative that remains out of reach and out of touch. I rework their direct instructions to build a poetics of surrogacy: the tool vibrates between a drawing implement, a phallus, and an object of labor.
-
In these actions, I fetishize the tool, grappling with its potential to make me something I desire. It stays with me: hung in the strap of my carpenter trousers, I brace the weight of the phantom limb.