NYAB Event - Tom Duncan "In Search of Lost Time"

Tom Duncan "In Search of Lost Time"

Andrew Edlin Gallery

This event has ended.

At 69, Tom Duncan continues to create art based on his childhood memories. His process involves a repeated return to his family's home in war-torn Scotland where he was born a few months before the outbreak of World War Two. Duncan grew up in an unpredictable world of bomb shelters, blackout curtains, rations and a nearby German prisoner of war camp. His oeuvre extends far beyond wartime Scotland, to include his emigration to America in 1947. For Duncan, remembrance is not simply recollection or nostalgia, but more an invitation to conjure up the past - people, places, and events - the result of which amounts to nothing less than their virtual reincarnation.

In addition to more recent works, this exhibition will include some pieces from the 1970's which announce his early mastery of what Andre Breton called convulsive beauty, a captivating, transgressive aesthetic that animates his narrative box-art mode to celebrate anomaly, accident, and abjection. Duncan's signature constellation of visual and thematic concerns are fully realized in several outstanding masterworks, the most notable to date the breathtaking Dedicated to Coney Island (1984-2002). Having previously been on extended loan to Baltimore's American Visionary Art Museum, In Search of Lost Time will feature this giant three-dimensional scene, a vivid, fantastical recreation of the fabled, New York City landmark, complete with moving parts. Conceived from the eyes of a child but with the mastery of an adult artist, Coney Island features real and imagined attractions, beloved rides set in motion such as the Wonder Wheel, angels, devils, colorful bathers, and the elevated subway behind.

At a time when a kind of cultural amnesia seems to be the order of the day, in which young people lack real experience with war, and in which the cultural richness of places like Coney Island are being replaced by the corporate aesthetic of Disney, Duncan's work functions as an important record of the way the world once was.