Stephen Tomasko Bio:

For over thirty years, Stephen Tomasko has been creating photographs, collages, drawings, and paintings inspired by American history, life, and landscape. His work is held in many permanent collections throughout the world, including the Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art in Washington, D.C.; the Karuizawa New Art Museum in Japan; Museum Schloss Moyland, Bern, Switzerland; and the Akron Art Museum, Akron, Ohio, where his works were also exhibited in 2011 and 2016. Other recent shows include Stephen Tomasko—Loyal to The Lot, the inaugural solo exhibition of the Paul Brown Museum at MassMu, Massilon, Ohio; A Book About Death at the Islip Art Museum, Long Island, New York; Mother Tongue at the Griffin Museum of Photography gallery in Boston, Massachusetts; and Stephen Tomasko—Historic Figures at Snow College in Ephraim, Utah.

Stephen is the recipient of both an Individual Excellence Award and a grant from the Ohio Arts Council and an Akron Soul Train Fellowship, where he is now a member of the selection committee. He presented an artist talk as part of the first FRONT International Triennial, and a monograph of his work, Delira + Excira, was published by the Shanti Arts Press.

He holds a BA in Art History and Philosophy from Bowling Green State University and an MFA from the University of Delaware. He currently lives and works in Bath, Ohio.

Artist Statement:

I fully embrace chance as an exciting and fundamental element in my work. For example, the way things are never exactly repeatable in photography. Elements of nature, light, and human hands are constantly coming into play, scrambling and reconfiguring potential images in front of me.  

Chance is also key to my collage work. Items cross my path in the world. I compile and collect them. Allow them to suggest to me how they might interact with each other, both visually and thematically. Cut some paper, arrange it, turn it over, see how the scraps that remain might actually be just what I was looking for all along. Many of the pieces in this show happened to start with a small tourist guide to Chartres Cathedral, printed in beautiful black and white, that I bought from a heap of books recently for ten cents. Memories of my visits to the cathedral mixed with my glee over the sumptuous black tones of the pages started me down paths where the end destination was exciting but unknown.

And so goes the title for the show. A small workbook, in a pile of paper at a thrift shop. The sweet hand of a young girl from many years ago, Doris Peat, practicing her words. My mind begins to spin. I like like things, and what I look at is often the same same. But, of course, it never quite exactly is.

       – Stephen Tomasko