ABOUT THE WORK

“The memory has as many moods as the temper and it shifts scenery like a diorama.” -George Eliot

Michael Thomsen's work is a shrine to the subconscious. Through personal dreamscapes and nostalgic familiarity, each piece forms a multi-layered narrative that, when inspected, both tricks the eye and quickens emotion. From a tarnished thimble, whose well-worn surface holds the memory of a seamstress long forgotten, to the chipped paint on an old wooden game piece discarded by a child who's since grown, lived and died. These collective found objects retain human imprints from their wear; their life force dampened but still significant.

Thomsen's physical sculptures sew his own memories and dreams together with those of strangers, creating disjointed yet synergistic time capsules from the past, present and future. These accumulated antiquities of magic and wonder are his own personal chimera; a broken code of dreams, shuffled and reconfigured. In Thomsen's work, myth, secret histories and the subliminal are merged into heirloom effigies with a collective consciousness.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Michael Thomsen is a spinner of visual yarns; a junk connoisseur with an eye for forgotten treasure. At 7 years of age Thomsen's first job was working for his grandfather, an auctioneer, who hired him to sort trunks and boxes full of trinkets and old-timey miscellanea. Slowly but surely, Thomsen began squirreling away the occasional sparkly bauble, old key or foreign coin until he amassed a cigar box full of his own unusual curios--items that have found their way into his sculptures here and there over the years. Since then, Thomsen's obsessive collecting of objects de art both large, small, broken and immaculate continues.

As self-taught artist, Michael's family roots and unusual childhood experiences are apparent in his work. In addition to the auctioneer grandfather, his grandfather on his mother's side was a clockmaker, a painter, and a violinmaker with whom Thomsen spent a lot of time growing up. His great uncle ran a carnival, which traveled up and down the coast of California in the 1970s. Thomsen's childhood recollections of these and other memories are a clearly visible influence in his work, which ranges from dark to whimsical to nostalgic and back again.