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Tobin Cagnoni: Artist Statement

After finishing school and thinking about how I was influenced by other artists, I wondered how I would develop my own artistic vision and what I desired to convey with my art. I started doing more work which involved the found object. I have always had a significant fondness for found object pieces in art history and recognized a great beauty in many found, discarded, and/or wasted objects. One of my goals was to put those objects into a piece of art which would enhance the object's natural beauty. I have also focused on objects made of wood to bring attention to the large amount of wood being wasted and discarded into landfills. I intend to bring attention to the natural abstract expressionism of the wood grain by giving thought to how the tree expressed its history.

I aim to provide the viewer a starting point, something they may recognize as the landscape. In my eye, though the landscape is just ths starting point, the horizon is what makes the viewer want to look further and deeper, to explore under or around the landscape. My true objective is to give the discarded-turned-found object a platform so it may tell its visually complex story, the object's history and the different roles it played, and continues to play, over the duration of its life. In other words, in my art I attempt to show the object's life in a way that the vieweer may perceive the object as a living entity with a diverse and interesting history.

In my estimation, the empty or barren landscape represents the fact that most of our trees have been cut down to make many of the items that are discarded. Via the magic of visual expression, the trees are finally being returned to the landscape from which they came.

Sincerely,

Tobin D. Cagnoni