OCMA (Orange County Museum of Art)

CASUAL T is a new site-responsive installation by Chicago-based artist Tony Lewis (b. 1986, Los Angeles, CA) in OCMA’s Avenue of the Arts Gallery. Extending Lewis’s ongoing investigation of the relationships between drawing, abstraction, and language, CASUAL T pushes the notion of collage to emphasize the blurred boundaries between art and writing, revealing words as objects laden with history. Building on the artist’s connection to Calvin and Hobbes—the influential and beloved comic strip by Bill Watterson about a boy and his stuffed tiger, which ran worldwide from 1985–95—CASUAL T operates as what Lewis describes as a “stepping stone” to poetry.

 

Clips from Calvin and Hobbes are edited, erased, and rearranged to create drawings that examine the presence and material weight of language. Paired with works created from Lewis’s ongoing exploration of graphite as a medium, individual pieces share space to create a larger conceptual installation, one that makes the intangible tangible. Utilizing the gallery’s architecture—large windows that enable the work to be seen up close and from afar—CASUAL T creates a plethora of possibilities, shifting the way we read to open up new, unexpected meanings and ultimately changing our understanding of the form and function of language.

 

Tony Lewis: CASUAL T is organized by Courtenay Finn, Chief Curator, with Ziying Duan, Assistant Curator, Amanda Seadler, Collections and Exhibitions Director, and with support from the entire OCMA staff.

The exhibition would not have been possible without the support of Karl Haendel, Edward Oh, Chenée A. Lewis, Roland Miller, and Joe Reihsen, and artist assistants Kristine Alejandrino, Aaron Baldwin, Chloe Bechtol, Kallie Dodd, Noah Kelber, Angela Mendoza, Arios Muñoz, Vanessa Reyes, Abigail Roxas, Alyssa Santos-Gonzalez, Mo Zhou, and Kayleigh Ziehler-Martin.