Tom Hughes has a wonderful wife and young daughter. Due to some of the danger his art can possess, he found it high time to get out of the house and get a studio. His studio is actually part of an unfinished building (Hughes is the artist from Seattle), but it suits his needs perfectly. “This is just a studio for the most part and then when it needs to be, we open the doors and it becomes a gallery,” said Hughes.
The first time his studio will be a gallery is April 25th for his show “Mere Mortals” and he urges people to leave their kids at home. That’s because his art contains electricity, sharp objects, and motorized parts – none of which are really suitable for children. Hughes finds it hard to put a name on his art. Some might call it sculpture, but in his mind it’s “things.” Hughes said, “It’s not a business in any way. I’m not trying to sell things, I’m trying to show things.”
Hughes grew up in Niagara Falls and has always been around the Buffalo area. He went to the University at Buffalo for photography, but wasn’t sure if that was the right fit for him. “I had your sort of standard ‘don’t-know-what-you’re-doing-in-college plan,’” said Hughes.
After UB, he traveled to Seattle where he spent a good amount of time before enrolling in a graduate program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He became a graduate student in fine art and worked a lot with printmaking. He drew up a lot of diagrams for things and his teachers liked them, but urged him to begin making them. Once he did, he had found his true artistic calling.
Hughes met his wife and was married, then returned to Buffalo. He works at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery as the Digital Media Resources Coordinator. (That means he obtains photographs of artwork for media companies.) Hughes is also in his first year of being an adjunct professor at Erie Community College teaching a class in drawing and design.
Though that brings home the bacon, his passion remains his artwork. Pictured above is Hughes next to an untitled work. What you’re seeing is a lot of tiny motors, each with a scalpel blade attached to the end of it, all running off of the same circuit. When in operation, a sensor turns on and off the motors as a person would pass by.
With the same principle behind it, above is Hughes next to his work, ‘Fight or Flight.’ It is different than the untitled work. The untitled work chips against the wall where as the dangling motors spin in the air and are operated by a foot pedal on the ground. The art viewer would step on the pedal to get the motors to spin their sharp blades. Since they all operate on the same circuit, “They all have to work together to make it happen,” said Hughes.
Though Hughes was kind enough to explain some of his “things” to me, he said, “In a more ideal situation, I wouldn’t be talking so much. I’d just let you go with it. I don’t think it matters a whole lot that you know the background of it.”
Hughes had a grandfather who he said in “classic guy fashion” liked to take things apart and put them back together in his workshop. For Hughes, it started when his daughter was born. He started taking apart a lot of her animated toys and finding their almost disturbing interiors and discovering how they operated.
“You don’t have to be an engineer to figure it out. It’s all kind of experimental. A lot of time I don’t know how it’s going to work until it’s done,” said Hughes.
Hughes views his work as a point of departure. A lot could be said about a system that functions together and when one motor dies, the rest die with it. How they all fruitlessly chip away at a wall until they die out. Or spin in the air, dangling and dangerous yet unmoving. With these odd characteristics, Hughes said, “I find it pretty easy to project human stuff into them. I think it’s a point of departure.”
All of Hughes work takes some participation or some thought to fully understand it. The artwork mentioned in this post only happens to be the artwork with corresponding photos. However, Hughes has a lot more to offer at his upcoming show. His opening show will be held on April 25th from 5:30-8pm with hours that Saturday and Sunday from 1-4pm. Hughes studio is located at 218 Grant Street and for more information about it, check out his website.
Below is a photograph of Hughes next to his kinetic sculpture entitled “Cerberus.” When pressing the button on top, the motors (obtained from weed whackers) spin on the floor.