Waseem Touma arrived at the University of Kentucky as a M.F.A. candidate in 2003; since then he has worked with the artist-in-residency program at the University of Kentucky's Martin Luther King Jr. Cultural Center, the Living Arts and Science Center and is currently the visual arts instructor for the Kentucky Governor's School for the Arts.
Fortunately for us, he is still living in Lexington and engaged in an artistic exploration that involves each and every one of us.
With an extraordinary level of intimacy and personal commitment, his artwork explores simple forms and how those physical forms interact with one another to create a complex system of patterns and meanings, and ultimately life. We are part of that system.
When I first encountered the work of Touma at the Icehouse in 2006, I knew I could place his expressive drawings and site-specific sculptures on a continuum instigated by Jackson Pollock and his contemporaries.
Some images brought to mind the palette and gesture of Pollock's action paintings and were not conceived for the two-dimensional surface alone. Many of Touma's works are, in a way, the beginnings for much larger installations that tend to fill a gallery space like Judy Pfaff filled a gallery space.
This exhibition was Touma's M.F.A. thesis show titled "Possibilities." It did not rely on frames or pedestals, only single repetitive forms skillfully threaded together with nearly perfect spacing. Mitigating the tidiness of porcelain disks, Touma inserted large wire rims wrapped with fiber that were highly reactive.
It was painting and sculpture, site installation and drawing; the show challenged conventional boundaries and materials in art like Lee Bontecou challenged conventional boundaries and materials in art.
I was excited to see work in Lexington that fit into my comfort zone of conversation, my level of understanding and art historical study, which is focused, in part, on the Pollock phenomenon and those artists who were inspired by his work. I had a handle on Waseem ToumaÖor did I?
In drawing parallels to canonical figures like Pollock, Pfaff and Bontecou, I began to realize precisely what Touma was doing. He was asking me to consider how my interactions with his creations had the power to alter the final meaning.
Touma, it appeared, hoped to convey to his audience the possibilities that open up as we examine our interaction within the systemÖwhatever the system, be it one of Touma's installations, the media, a neighborhood association or our families. So, rather than tie Touma to a rigid canon of artistic practice, particularly for the sake of justification, it is far more meaningful to consider the broader themes that his work engages.
Touma's desire to know how things interact with other things and how life develops from those interactions seems to stem from a very personal place. Motivated by his upbringing, Touma began to contemplate how his cultural identity formed from the simple but disparate facts that he was raised in Australia by Lebonese parents who spoke no English.
As he began to examine the smaller parts that make up a whole, his study turned to the science known as Emergence - the study of how complex systems arise out of simple interactions. Emergent structures are patterns not created by one event but rather by a series of interactions. Can such a science hold some clue to the development of cultural identity? Are we not all emergent structures?
After receiving his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Kansas City Art Institute (KCAI) in 2002 and one week prior to an appointment as the assistant technician at KCAI in the ceramics department, Touma was in a bad car crash. He damaged his spine for life.
From that point forward his artwork turned to an analysis of the importance of individual elements that make up the whole. "Once one little thing is out of place, the whole system ceases to function how it should, I started seeing this everywhere, from building structures to the way communities work together and live by bouncing off each other, planetary magnetic forces that keep the solar system exactly where it needs to be for us to exist, ecosystems-it's an amazing level of fragility that life sustains," Touma said.
One small repetitive form, possibly a literal reference to Touma's physicality and its relative fragility, is fundamental to Touma's work. It is a small ceramic disk.
These disks build entire entities that take on a life of their own. Touma acknowledges that alone the ceramic disk is so fragile "it would just crumble in my hand if I squeeze it too hard." Together they hold much more strength.
From this very physical realization, Touma began seeing himself as an emergent structure created by a series of interactions that ultimately result in some ordered form.
Understanding this concept of Emergence as it relates to the work of Touma explains much more than comparing his works to that of canonical artists. Touma does not throw paint like Pollock, he does not come off the wall in the same chaotic manner as Pfaff, nor does he overwhelm or intimidate like Bonetcou. Instead Touma intends to make us all aware of our position in various ordered systems.
According to Touma, he suspends his work not only because it looks cool, but because it alters the relationship of scale between the audience and the object. "We have a programmed reaction to the art object sitting on a pedestal; we tend to look straight and down at stuff like we have complete control of a situation," he said.
For Touma, the audience or observer is an integral part of that chain of interactions; they, or we, are one of the single forms that contribute significantly to the power of the whole.
Touma challenges us to consider our position, use our imagination and understand the importance of our actions as they have the power to build rather than detract or weaken what so many small things have come together to form-life.
Lexington Outdoor Mural Project 2008
Waseem Touma recently received a commission to paint a mural for the High Street YMCA as part of the new Outdoor Mural Project hosted by LexArts and the Lexington Fayette Urban County Government.
Touma began work on the mural, which is located at the intersection of Vine and Quality streets, in early September. When asked about the design, he acknowledged that the concept behind this work of art was guided by the parameters of the commission, which were all about community.
Jim Clark, president and CEO of LexArts, organized the Outdoor Mural Project in such a way that would engage the public on the most meaningful level. Sometime after the Knight Legacy Initiative talks, when an overwhelming number of citizens expressed an interest in more public art, Clark formed an advisory committee to begin work on the mural project. Members of that committee included: Jim Gray, Chuck Ellinger, Linda Gorton, Pam Seimer, Julie Decker, Deborah Borrowdale-Cox, Darren Taylor, Marianne Blodgett, Ellen Gregory and Harold Tate.
The advisory committee selected the sites for the murals by accepting applications from neighborhood associations around town. LexArts then issued a Call-to-Artists; they received project proposals from artists all over the country. Drawing from our local pool of creativity, the two artists chosen by the neighborhood associations live and work right here in Lexington.
The second mural is located at Al's Bar on North Limestone Street and was awarded to Michael Burell. While Touma's commission, titled "Healthy Mind, Body, and Spirit," is an abstracted message that speaks about our individual contributions to a healthier community, Burell pays tribute to Lexington's past in an explosion of representative imagery of musicians like Charles Quillings, Les McCann, Duke Madison, Jim Rankin, George Gentry, J.D. Crowe and Byron Romanowitz.
Funded in part by monies collected from the HorseMania public art program, LexArts has kicked off the Outdoor Mural Project with these two murals and hopes that this is only the beginning.