Taryn Tomasello

Today, more and more of what we define as culture, politics and style is mediated through an algorithmic ontogeny that is designed to reflect back what the seeker seeks: echo chamber and generative reflection.

Our inner worlds and opinions are returned to us by a constructed product machine. We think we are encountering truth based on some gained knowledge or experience. We think that we are finding our people, our community and that it is a large community because of the volume and concentration of engagement provided by the digital environment. The result of this feedback loop is an emotional climate where we think people agree with us while simultaneously becoming more aware of sensationalized accounts of others who oppose our positions. Observation: people are becoming splintered into smaller and more disparate affinity groups.

These niche groups reinforce a sense of self-righteousness and a lack of empathy. The desire is to feel less alone, less alienated, but the result is a falsely inflated sense of belonging to some invisible majority that has a dangerous and powerful enemy: the Other Side. This leads to a greater attitude of intolerance and fear with subsequent spontaneous violent acts within third spaces and exaggerated requirements of group belonging.

Yet, there is no somewhere else to escape to. This is the fantasy of the ark, the fantasy that allows us to choose separation or isolated survival. This fantasy, the fantasy of a pocket or sect that has everything it needs to survive, is an illusion.

Instead, survival depends on creating outside of a consumerist framework, outside of predictable production: aleatory praxis in aesthetics. The distinction between permanence and impermanence can no longer be observed. Forms – useful objects, future cultural landscapes, valuable ideas – must predict their own critiques and begin to characterize a new aesthetics of survival. The most important element of an aesthetic of survival is the necessary changeability of the use value of the form.

"Cradle" is an exhibition built around a series of questions about their relationship to guns now and in childhood posed to various anonymous people from different locations within the United States of America spanning the year 2025-2026. They come from different geographical areas, different demographics and identities.The transcript constitutes a screenplay titled THE ACT OF GENTLY HOLDING SOMETHING THAT HAS THE POTENTIAL FOR GREAT VIOLENCE that is built from the participants’ answers to the questions. Excerpts from the screenplay were performed by Aurora San Miguel, in relation to a Brechtian set constructed from a boy’s discarded bed frame at Veronica in Seattle, WA, with props: wooden facsimiles of various ATV gun cradles carved in the style of Dillinger’s famous carved piece of wood he purportedly brandished to escape from a maximum security prison in 1934.

About the Artist

Taryn Tomasello is an artist living and working in Portland, OR. She makes art at the intersection of text, event, image, material and objects. She is concerned with witnessing and latency. Through collecting and handling forms and ideas, Tomasello's work functions as a critique of our history and our present, endeavoring to make sense of irreconcilable futures. Although research is an integral part of Tomasello’s practice, she maintains a deep affinity with the uninvited and unknown. While Tomasello has shown in art spaces across the US and internationally, her best work often exists outside the confines of traditional gallery settings and beyond the reach of conventional documentation. Tomasello holds an MFA in Sculpture from the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College and a BFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art.