“Working in animation, installation, and music, Tom Thayer employs a“naive” look to provide access to a variety of experiences often marginalized by art: adolescent obsessions, visionary mythologies, and private fantasies that delve deep into the unsettled recesses of gesture and mimetic storytelling. Drawing on outsider art and weird Americana, as well as surrealistic assemblage, Thayer maintains these references in their raw, unsublimated, and occasionally demented state rather than packaging them into an easily digestible form.

A DIY aesthetic comprising rough materials and outmoded, analog technologies complements the work’s delicately absurdist humor as Thayer alternates between director, narrator, editor, set designer, and composer: in Black Fowl Reflection, 2008, a feathery black bird concealing a turntable stylus in its beak bobs up and down against a portable turntable, producing erratic scratches to a recording of Thayer’s electro-acoustic music. A recent LP entitled Old Smelly Haircut begins with monotone lyrics delivered over a pulsating synth, recalling the primitivist shock tactics of the English noise group Throbbing Gristle. For the accompanying music video, which evokes Eastern European animation, Thayer animates his figures with a halting, jittery motion that resonates with the music while staying just out of synch.

As an educator, Thayer is interested in theories of collaborative pedagogy, including the musical experimentation developed in England around Cornelius Cardew and his Scratch Orchestra, a compositional project conducted entirely by untrained, amateur participants. In Thayer’s own collaborative workshops, theatrical scenarios—including shadow puppetry and sound collage—are intended to ignite what he calls the “creative power of collective action.” His long-standing interest in psychedelia, seen from this perspective, takes on new significance: the psychedelic, before it was consigned to a period style, aimed for a new form of sociability based on unmediated sensory communication. Through his work,Thayer revives its potential.”

-Michael Sanchez, New York City, 2012