Alexander/Heath Contemporary
is pleased to announce
an exhibition by interdisciplinary artist
Derek Toomes
“Lost + Found”
March 3 through March 31, 2023
OPENING RECEPTION:
Art-by-Night Friday, March 3rd, 2023, 5-9 pm
CLOSING RECEPTION:
Art-by-Night Friday, March 31st, 2023, 6-9 pm
New Downtown Location:
109 Campbell Avenue SW, Roanoke, Virginia
Lost + Found
Alexander / Heath Contemporary
Derek Toomes
The body of work created for the exhibition Lost + Found composes a quartet of primary movements through which visitors to the gallery experience subtle and surprising discoveries of interconnectivity. The title alludes to the paradoxical nature of sensory immersion, wherein a surplus threshold of kinetic, sonic, or virtual stimuli may alternatively result in sensations of extreme calm, quiet, and focus.
Throughout the exhibit, echoes of form and movement suggest a cyclical temporal dimension. The symbolic use of circular and disc-like components embeds the sense of an inner dialogue shared by the forms speaking to one another across the physical distance of the gallery space.
This helps interrogate the elemental boundaries within the entire installation and viewer positions of subjectivity and objectivity established along that continuum. For instance, when a viewer moves from being enveloped by an atmospheric space of light projection, into a space in which they view sculptural forms at a scale smaller than the human body.
Kinetic forms intervene in and respond to the vascular-like air-exchange system of the building, conflating the architectural site as an expanded realm of the neural and physical pathways intrinsic to the human sensory experience.
Biography
Derek Toomes is an artist who lives and works in Greensboro, North Carolina. He serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Interior Architecture at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Derek received his MFA in New Media and Installation in 2017 from UNCG.
As a practicing and exhibiting artist, Derek’s work is dynamic and interdisciplinary. He utilizes technology as a medium in order to accentuate the digital realm as an amplified dimension of shared human experience. His work deals in the currencies of imagery, video, data, and quanta, grafting these experiences within sculptural forms, often kinetic or environmental in nature. This work ponders the scale of human and geological time, the persistence of memory, and the ever-expanding digital velocity which reconditions our understanding of the intimate and of the communal.
Derek has had numerous national and museum exhibitions, including most recently at: Everson Museum of Art, CAM Raleigh; LUMP Raleigh; The Greensboro Project Space, Ackland Museum of Art Chapel Hill, and the North Carolina Museum of Art. He has been invited to work on various collaborative art projects throughout Northern America.