Watch and Listen

NARRATOR: Walk around Tom Thayer’s installation. What do you notice? Thayer creates art that contains all sorts of things like paintings, paper puppets of people and birds, collages, and animated videos. During the Biennial, the artist will create a performance in this room using all of these different things.

Here, Thayer gives some advice:

TOM THAYER: It’s kind of like making artwork, you’re on this journey, and you don’t really know where it’s going. And it’s a collaboration between you and the art materials or you and like, you’ll do something and maybe what happens is a little unexpected. So then, that’s sort of the materials, making their move and then you respond to that and then the materials respond back to you.

I would maybe tell a young artist that probably a lot of the most interesting things happen through mistakes and failures. That seems to be where a lot of the magical things happen.