“I did not speak until I was five and found myself instead tearing and cutting up magazine pages, deconstructing and then reconstructing the text and images into something totally new, which I would employ to communicate with my family.” So begins Tom Cocotos’s journey into life as an artist. After obtaining an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering, Tom eventually returned to Art. His current medium of choice is collage and mixed media. His most recent body of work, “Butcher Paper,” is a collage series depicting cuts of lamb, beef and pork. “Through flesh, bone and sinew, I explore the meat case at the point where it intersects commerce, natural resources and privileged sustenance,” explains the artist. His works invoke meat’s “vigorous promise of sexuality,” while at the same time reflecting on food industry politics, looking at where pleasure and nourishment meet—“mortality and its denial.” Tom is currently Art 511’s neighbor where he works from his studio in the West Chelsea Arts Building on W 26th Street, although he is known to find himself making work on subways, in museums, on the streets, and in residencies in other cities and countries. Currently, he’s fascinated with the octopus and unraveling what this new body of work is about. He’s also returning to his collage series “Modern Arthropoda: Machinery in the hive of the city,” which features construction vehicles, with their multi-jointed arms, diggers and treads, as developers of our urban centers. It’s a natural progression from previous work depicting, in like fashion, insects and bees of the hive and the hill.
IG: @tcocotos
TWITTER: @tCOCOTOS
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