By Carly Proulx
A Found on Switch is the title of the Mohawk Valley Center for the Arts upcoming Fall exhibit, a dual show with work by Utica based artists Tony Thompson and Adam Spiridilozzi. The opening reception for the show will be held in the 401 Gallery on October 12 from 2pm to 5 pm and will be on display until November 16 during MVCA’s gallery hours. The exhibit features a handful of collaborative pieces by Thompson and Spiridilozzi, as well as originals by both artists. The title elicits an affecting image, a beacon of hope for the masses of avant-garde artist folk. If I had been both alive and an art die-hard in 1970, chances are good I’d have seen the work of both these artists leveled up, rubbing elbows next to that of the legendary Jean Michel Basquiat. You can tag it High Art Graffiti or Contemporary Wild, but whatever your fancy of phrase, the work itself is unconventional and edgy while vulnerable and refreshingly expressive.
Thompson is no stranger to collaboration. He’s been an art instructor for a little over a year now, teaching a variety of students in the 6-24 age range at the not-for-profit arts organization 4Elements Studio in downtown Utica. Thompson is often engaging with his students in this way, encouraging them to experiment, to explore, to play. Of working with the younger, inspired, and passionate student artists Thompson relays is for him a wellspring of joy and inspiration. He offers up his students as many options as possible. He encourages mistakes and enforces the theory that there’s no right or wrong way to get there, that maybe wherever there is isn’t so important. It wasn’t until Thompson walked into his 11th grade high school Ceramics class that he’d finally come across a teacher who didn’t tell him what to do. If certain techniques were inquired or interests piqued he’d happily show his students the way, but his method was merely to encourage whatever poured out of them. Up until the salvation of Ceramics class scribbling in his notebooks was Thompson’s only means of release from the crippling anxiety inducing structure of his classrooms. He’d spend all of his lunches and free periods for the rest of the year and the whole of his senior year in the Ceramics studio.
It takes all kinds to art, but for me Thompson and Spiridilozzi are the epitome of true living artists. Spiridilozzi, a multi-media artist from Utica, NY had a bit of a different experience in the classroom. Spiridilozzi got a lot out of his in school art classes, and fondly recalls the names of his junior high and high school teachers. Regardless of the well-received instruction Spiridilozzi reveals “I had to unlearn everything.” Though grateful for all of the newly acquired skills, he fleshes out “at a certain point you need to dispose of what you’ve been taught in order to enter new territory and break ground.” Spiridilozzi, an actor, musician, poet, playwright, painter, and the list go on is one of those talked the talk and walked the walk and chewed the gum while juggling flaming batons kind of artists.
Thompson and Spiridilozzi first met in the throes of collaboration. Back in the late 90s-early 2000’s Spiridilozzi was running the Resonance Center, a multi-faceted art center and community space at its 94 Genesee St location in Utica. It wasn’t its current state of a bustling sterling strip with the Taylor & Cook & Utica Bread (both have since relocated) and present-day Utica Coffee in the mix. The block was almost entirely abandoned. It was during the Resonance Center’s reign when the two first started connecting and collaborating. I watch them both reach back in their memory banks and summon up when Thompson and a group of students painted a collaborative mural on the brick wall of the center. Thompson continues to make art out of his home, whether it’s with spray paint, acrylic or using gelli-plate printing and has had a few local shows throughout the years, including an exhibition of his solo work at the old 4Elements satellite gallery, the window space of the Westwood on Genesee St. You can see Thompson’s other Utica mural on the outside of the Green Onion Pub on Genesee St, across the way from The Other Side and the most recently sold Cafe Domenicos. At the center, Spiridilozzi and supporting artists made art happen in many different forms. It was a mecca for the community of artists in Utica and a safety valve for the art that lived inside them. Of those days Spiridilozzi recalls “We made magic out of nothing. We were a no budget orchestra.”
Spiridilozzi’s most recent exhibition, “totems, spirits, and dwellers on the edge” was a series of paintings that debuted at the Other Side in Utica. “Something else,” an album he released by his music initiative ‘banned books,’ and the publication of a collection of his poems, “union and annihilation’ are just a few of the notches on his art belt. Currently his focus is on designing the infrastructure of ‘artordie.live,’ a web based artists portal as well a design and event production firm. When he isn’t being a hermit he’s almost always surrounded by other eccentric, non-traditionalist artists in his in-house studio, hosting jam sessions, writing groups, and maybe more accurate a hodgepodge of art, philosophy and friends.
Originally from Baldwinsville NY Thompson first found his way to Utica when he attended MVCC for Art education. Again, Thompson was met with the structure of the classroom, and falling into an anxiety tailspin again fell a little bit out of love with art. He tried his hand at welding before a last-minute switch to Silk screen printing.’ It was through this elective at MVCC that Thompson would learn to make and print t-shirts with his art. He’d professionally settle into the world of silk screen after MVCC for the next 8 years at Centerfield Sports, but all the while creating art at home on whatever scrap material was lying around. He’d even paint on cereal boxes, and got his first glimpse at what it could be like to make a living off of the art he created when he sold one of his homemade cereal boxes for fifty bucks at a First Friday pop-up show in Albany. A fired up Thompson began making and selling his t-shirts and other artwork more and more, at pop-up art shows, art fairs, craft shows, and taking commissions too. Not long after Thompson makes the decision to commit to being a full-time working artist he suffers his first stroke. Due to the side effects of the stroke Thompson’s creative results went from fine, detailed precision to free form sketch without boundaries. Frustration ensued when Thompson put the pressure on himself to do things the old way, but eventually with a shift in perspective he lets go and adapts, allowing himself to fully embrace the change. He ends up dubbing it his first authentic, creative style, and it is precisely that. It is authentic, honest, abandoned and raw.
How these painting collaborations first came about started with a kind of painter’s block. When either Spiridilozzi or Thompson would get stuck on one of the paintings they were working on they’d pass it off to the other. Lucky for these two living right next store to one another makes these exchanges pretty painless, unlikely to infringe upon their sometimes solitary lifestyles. They both work in acrylic, and express a fascination and fondness of human anatomy in their work, especially of the skeletal, post-mortem variety such as bones and teeth. These symbols, representational of the barest forms of the human body perhaps convey a deeper meaning for them both. Perhaps a mutual curiosity of mortality, suggesting or toying with the idea that this life cycle doesn’t always end with a corpse, that there’s permanence beyond death? In a faithless or mixed religious and spiritual society I think Art can often fill this void. But whatever compels these two isn’t really the point, as our own subconscious has a way of making itself heard in the caverns of art, the art itself becoming our echo.
Spiridilozzi speaks highly of his co-collaborator and friend, stating “Thompson is prolific.” When I asked him what he gets out of collaborating with artists like Thompson he says “It isn’t until artists start working together that art history adjusts.” Spiridilozzi, in his artists statement reveals that for him the creation of art is a psycho-cosmic experience, which explores the relation of the inner self (psyche) and the external world (cosmos). Thompson only believes in lucky mistakes. The collaborative pieces in the show betray how harmoniously and instinctively their perspectives and worlds coalesce, how indeed they’ve influenced each others lives and therefore their art. This is one of those symbiotic relationships, obvious when viewing their collaborative work, but when left to their own devices there’s no guessing that these are two separate individuals who have led two uniquely different lives. As portrayed in each their originals, though there’s a certain atmospheric likeness between the two artists work there’s undeniably a distinction. A found on switch invokes the span of generations in its own strange, urban expressionist way, beckoning the 1950s-1960s beatnik era, the street art scenes of the 1970-1980s, and concocting its own nuanced visual language in response to the modern era for which the only reliable translator is you, the viewer. Some pieces read like scraps of poems or unanswered riddles, and the viewer is left to try and connect the dots.
To me, the writer of this article, this work rejects perfectionism and formalism. It has no filter for the flaws in human man, and it has no aim to be fine art. In fact, it’s a total juxtaposition to see it at all confined to the walls of a gallery, but that’s the beauty of art. You can’t box it in even when you try. It’s ethereal and it lives beyond walls, and even beyond the artists themselves. And if we’re not afraid of change and allow ourselves to embrace the inevitable evolution of art then we can live in awe of it all. Oscar Wilde said it best in the preface to the novel Dorian Gray when he said, “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.” Who knows, you just might find ‘a found on switch.’