Artist Talk: Thomas E. Dade

About “This is a Story, About A Story” 

This body of work unfolds as a reel—part memory, part observation, part invention. “This is a story, about a story” is an homage to people watching: a practice rooted in my upbringing, shaped by flipping through magazines, absorbing television, and studying cartoons as both entertainment and education. 

In many ways, these works act as counter-surveillance. Where surveillance flattens and reduces, I’m interested in expanding—restoring complexity, ambiguity, and layered identity. Each figure, form, and gesture exists within multiple narratives at once: seen and unseen, performed and private, remembered and imagined. I often think about something Sam Gilliam once shared with me—that you can learn an awful lot from cartoons. That lesson is present here. Cartoons collapse time, exaggerate truth, and hold contradictions without explanation. In a similar way, these works move between humor and gravity, distortion and clarity, fiction and lived experience. Materially and visually, layering becomes both method and meaning. Surfaces build, interrupt, and reveal—mirroring the ways we construct ourselves in the world. These pieces are not singular statements, but accumulations: of observation, influence, and lived encounters. Ultimately, this exhibition is a survey of perception—how we see, how we’re seen, and how stories form in the space between. It is not one story, but many stories happening at once. And like any good reel, it invites you to pause, rewind, and look again.