Today we’d like to introduce you to TML Dunn.
Every artist has a unique story. Can you briefly walk us through yours?
I have to start with the amazing magnet high school I attended in Baltimore County, The Carver Center for Arts and Technology, that gave me an excellent foundation in art, especially the naturalistic tradition. It was new and innovative and a number of faculty had left the Maryland Institute College of Art in order to teach there. I can’t overstate how important that experience was. Later, in NYC, I attended The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, another extraordinary institution I am very lucky to have attended, and I worked fabricating sculpture and doing installations internationally for a pretty well-known video artist then and for some years afterward.
From around 2007 to 2010 I was part of a lively arts non-profit in Long Island City called The Space; we had a blast, throwing monthly gallery shows and rocking a 25,000-sq-ft warehouse studio right off the Queensboro Bridge (known from the other end as the 59th Street Bridge). It’s hard to imagine that much idle property in the neighborhood anymore. I have strong feelings, both good and bad, about the way that neighborhood has changed since then, and the Amazon headquarters is going to upend all of them.
My first wife (an exciting artist, herself) and I moved to San Diego in 2010. She got her MFA from UCSD and I worked a season at the La Jolla Playhouse and for about four years at The New Children’s Museum. Both of those jobs involved a ton of design and fabrication, odd and diverse things with strange material requirements, and they had a big impact on my own sculptural practice, I’m sure. Since 2012 I’ve had a studio at Space 4 Art in the East Village. From 2013 to 2017 I sat on the Curatorial Committee there, organizing and hanging shows in our old 15th Street gallery. Between my time in San Diego and in New York, I must have hung a hundred shows of all sizes. I absolutely love that kind of work.
Please tell us about your art. What do you do / make / create? How? Why? What’s the message or inspiration, what do you hope people take away from it? What should we know about your artwork?
Those are big questions! The forms and ends of my output are really diverse and go in lots of different directions. I think that’s a strength of my work, but it makes the work tricky to talk about. Lately I’ve been focusing on kinetic sculptures. For instance, a small version of my body, mounted museum-style under a bell jar, with a subtle effect that makes it appear to slowly breathe. A static project soon after that was a 3D visualization of the surprisingly enormous amount of data describing the structure of a particular 1mm-long flatworm’s nervous system. My current day job as a programmer was very helpful here. I bought 2 miles of twine in 11 colors for that piece, and, over 200 hours in, I know I’m not halfway there yet.
For a long time now, a lot of my work has involved text, in paintings and drawings and sculptures. Sometimes it’s layered and basically illegible, sometimes a big clean stenciled shout, sometimes rotating insistently at low or very high speeds. I like the way text draws people in and they often find themselves reading my work closely before anyone can say “I don’t know how to look at art”.
Despite how explicit or suggestive text can be to work with, I’m interested right now in more visceral experiences than the often-cerebral stuff with text. My next set of works includes drawings, sculptures, and installations on themes of claustrophobia and loss, and I’m really excited about it. This includes architectural sketches for pieces of impracticable scale as well as small but complex installations that surround a single viewer’s head. I found myself sketching projects that I find somewhat dreadful, as in really dread-inducing, and decided that those look like a promising path toward some genuine encounters.
As an artist, how do you define success and what quality or characteristic do you feel is essential to success as an artist?
Great, more steep questions! Regarding the first, how I define success: The best art, to me, serves the purpose of knowledge production. It tells how something goes, something that hadn’t existed previously but that has a robust logic. It’s an addition to the arena of discourse akin to a scientific discovery. I find my thrill in art-making at the surprising connections, the learning. I want to show and share my work widely and have it seen in conversation with other art, or all other art. And I want to make as much of it as possible.
Regarding a quality that I feel is essential to success, that’s a little more nebulous. I think, first of all, a work is likely to be successful if you’ve learned something in the making of it. By definition it will have something new in it. I try to make each piece a strong and significant part of how I see the world. In a word, I think confidence is the characteristic. Confidence in what you’ve made and pride in what it took to get it done.
Do you have any advice for other artists? Any lessons you wished you learned earlier?
Line is an abstraction. It blew my mind when a teacher said that in college. In high school I’d had great training in drawing, but no one had ever phrased it that simply: line is an abstraction. What we see is fields of one value against another. Humans don’t see lines, we just use them conceptually.
Also, take the health warnings on solvents, spray paints, and epoxies seriously! Don’t buy the cheapest respirator, and don’t balk at the cost of filters. Use that respirator religiously.
How or where can people see your work? How can people support your work?
As a matter of fact, I’m really pleased that I have work up in two places in town right now. I have two paintings and a drawing at the Sparks Gallery in the Gaslamp District through January 20th. Also, I’m in the current group show, “Figure of Speech”, in Terminal 2 of the San Diego International Airport, through mid-April. That whole show is really worth padding your travel schedule to give it some time.
We have open studios events at Space 4 Art pretty regularly. Most of our two dozen artists have their studios open to visitors, and works for sale, et cetera. Those are always a great time! I encourage everyone to get on our email list at sdspace4art.org. And I always welcome studio visits from people who love art.
Contact Info:
- Website: tmldunn.com
- Email: matt@tmldunn.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tmldunn/
Image Credit:
Chi Essary, Ryan Scott
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