Tom Estes
Profile/CV
Tom Estes is an artist who employs various social web platforms as an artistic tool. His work focuses on the liberatory potenital for the internet to serve as a performative archive and an alternative exhibition space.
Artist Tom Estes has always leaned toward making work participatory or immersive in some way. His work to date questions the value and integrity of a coherent ‘public perception’ and Estes’ innovative web adventures and conversations are situated within current debates around the ubiquity of new technologies and of the shared delusions of human experience. Estes does this with wit and economy by paraphrasing early Sci-fi and horror films and their associated ideological fictions. The science fiction genre itself has long served as a useful vehicle for "safely" discussing controversial issues and how individuals are constrained, liberated or altered. Estes’ use of these devices in an artistic context not only allows a deeper examination and reflection on the most difficult or disturbing issues but also with the perspective of a viewer watching remote events. For Estes, fantasy and illusion are not contradictions of reality, but instead an integral part of our everyday lives.
Tom Estes has been hung, played and performed in a few of the world’s right places and a couple of deliciously wrong ones. While the mainstay of Estes' practice has been his more ephemeral installations, and embryonic Live Art performance, his internet based interventions have involved the displayed of work in some of the more cutting edge and experimental events & projects found in public institutions such as The New Gallery Walsall, The De La Warr Pavilion, The Centre for Recent Drawing, 'Late Nights' at The Whitechapel Gallery and also as well as projects organised by Tate Modern. Estes' work can be found in private collections as well as permanent collections such as at Matt Roberts Arts and The Lethaby Gallery, The Welcome Collection and AUP at The Serpentine Gallery.
Website www.TomEstes.info
