Thomas (Tommy) Stoeckinger
Bio/Brief Statement:
A lifelong resident of the Southern and Central California Coasts, Thomas Stoeckinger makes objects, performances, performative objects, and the occasional video. While working as a tradesperson and exhibiting work in Los Angeles, Thomas attended Santa Monica College before receiving a BFA from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in 2018 and completing an MFA at UC Santa Barbara in the Spring of 2020.He currently lives and works near San Luis Obispo CA.
Thomas has reflected on experiences as a professional landscaper, a fan of major league baseball, and a student of academic subjects (like art theory, sociology, philosophy, and anthropology) to inform a pragmatic approach of balancing the utility and contradictions of garden variety vocabularies and privileges with an adaptive awareness to changing meaning and circumstances. Projects that include flaccid baseball bats, or miniature sculptures of “The Jolly Green Giantess” babysitting a little man, illustrate attempts to facilitate ironic disruptions of current manifestation of a pastoral American dream and normative power dynamics. This guy seems pretty serious about not taking himself too seriously.