daniel thomas
class of 2021
Daniel is an artist, writer, and researcher. In research and in the studio he focuses on painting, often extending into print, bookarts, and text. Inquiries chiefly consider the possibility and problematics of Queer abstraction, analyzing it’s hermanutics, performativity, and relationship to Abstract Expressionsim and AbEx’s notorious critiques. He works at the Wattis Institute and at the office of Enrollment Services. He completed a residency at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 2018; exhibits locally; and, holds a BFA in Painting and Drawing from the California College of the Arts, as of Spring 2019.
Daniel’s Thesis
Chemsex: Diaspora and Transition in Rosha Yaghmai’s Miraclegrow
Miraclegrow, a 2019 installation by Rosha Yaghmai, conceptually destabilizes personal ontologies of nationality, sex, and body as home. In this paper on Miraclegrow, I reflect on the unhomeliness of identity and the unviability of nostalgia, theorizing nonteleological trans and diasporic becomings, untethered from any ideal past. The installation contains an audio track, which combines a 1970s Farsi pop song with the Three’s Company theme song. The combination of an Iranian song with the Southern Californian TV show metaphorizes the artist’s diasporic roots in both places. The central sculpture in the installation is a seventeen-foot-long, thickly encrusted tube that represents a massively oversized hair. Its complex surface amalgamates silicone body casts, Miracle-Gro fertilizer, nail polish, and found materials. The hair sculpture constitutes a handmade body archive, suggesting a queerly amorphous mode of embodiment. I turn to transgender theories that ruminate on the queer in-betweenness of transition to make sense of this accumulative mode of embodiment as well as fertilizer’s allusions to sex and fertility.