The Art of Tom Duncan

Yesterday we went to the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore with our friends Bill and Claire, an amazing place well worth the visit. (What is “visionary art,” you ask? Well you can read all about it on their Web site. Suffice to say that the museum was stuffed to the gills with retro pop nostalgia new age folk revival scrap iron pseudo-religious art and iconography.) I was particularly struck by the work of one Tom Duncan, who builds enormous interactive dioramas out of old toys, junk media, and other, less identifiable, materials. One site I found describes his work as “narrative polychrome sculpture”—”At first glance, Tom Duncan’s sculpture—with its specific autobiographical detail—feels overwhelmingly personal. In time, greater themes—the indelible imprint of war, religion and Pop culture on childhood memory—surface in Duncan’s intense, complex work.”

We saw the Coney Island piece visible unfinished on the site (“a model train lover’s wet dream”) completed and installed at the museum. The real masterpiece, however, was called “Slave Ship,” a rustbucket ship of state plowing through dark, unknown waters with a its cargo of African abductees surrounded by a crushing riot of pop culture iconography, all remediated and recontextualized in the close, claustrophobic space of this dark and terrible Wunderkammer of the “American dream.”

Words, or at least my words, fail. And I can’t find a picture out their on the Web. Here’s what the Baltimore CITY Paper has to say: “Cast upon a sea of faux leopard fur, and bearing hundreds of figurines that represent the loss of African cultural identity, discrimination, and other long-term aftereffects of the transatlantic slave trade, Duncan’s ship hides a hypnotically undulating coffin, attached to the bottom of the hold with rusty chains and visible via a mirror.”

Trust me, it’s worth the trip.