Jim Pomeroy (artist)
| Jim Pomeroy | |
|---|---|
| Born | March 21, 1945 |
| Died | April 6, 1992 (aged 47) |
| Nationality | American |
| Other names | James C. Pomeroy |
| Occupation | artist |
James C. Pomeroy (March 21, 1945 Reading, Pennsylvania – April 6, 1992, Arlington, Texas) was an American artist whose practice spanned a variety of media including performance art, sound art, photography, installation art, sculpture, and video art.
Jim Pomeroy was born March 21, 1945, in Reading, Pennsylvania. The family moved to a small town in Texas when he was three, and then to Montana when he was sixteen. Pomeroy developed an early interest in model airplanes and electrical machines, and his science-related interests were encouraged in high school.
Pomeroy went to the University of Texas, Austin, initially planning to go into physics but discovering that he wasn't very good at it. He switched his major to art and studied stone sculpture, ceramics, and painting for five years, leaving with a B.A. in 1968. He began working in an Abstract Expressionist style before migrating to Minimalism and Conceptualism and bringing industrial processes, materials, and methods into his work. Under the influence of artists like Robert Smithson, Donald Judd, and Tony Smith, he left Texas in 1968 and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. He received his M.A. (1971) and M.F.A. (1972) in art from the University of California at Berkeley. To support himself in graduate school and for several years afterwards, Pomeroy worked as a preparator at museums and galleries in California and Texas.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Pomeroy was a prominent figure in the performance art and installation activity associated with Bay Area conceptual art. He disliked the rigid separations between media maintained by most art schools and referred to himself as a "general practitioner" and is now considered a pioneer in the field of new media art, developing an anti-spectacular, witty aesthetic that fed on his lifelong interest in popular mechanics, informal science experiments, garage invention, and home-brewed technology. Among his friends and collaborators are such artists as Perry Hoberman, Paul Kos, and Paul DeMarinis and the curator Suzanne Foley. DeMarinis describes him as a quintessential artist-tinkerer, one of a generation of artists who, growing up in the era of the first space program, "had been inculcated with the codes of science and technology, but who had reterritorialized them to identify technology with culture." Two of his best-known pieces of the mid 1970s, Mozart's Moog and Fear Elites, used music-box mechanisms to raise questions about the role of the human performer in an era of increasingly automated and synthetic forms of music production. Other works, such as Newt Ascending Astaire's Face and Turbo Pan, are partly inspired by 19th century technologies such as the zoetrope. He also created a pair of works, Composition in Deep/Light at the Opera and Clear Bulbs Cast Sharp Shadows, based on 3D technology of the period and requiring anaglyphic (red-green) glasses for viewing.
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