Tom Estes

Profile Information

• Field/Industry Digital Media, Installation Art, Performance, Photography, Artist
• School/Institution Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design
• Website http://www.TomEstes.info
• Bio I am an artist and my work has been hung, played and performed in a few of the world’s right places and a couple of deliciously wrong ones. I was born outside of Boston in The U.S.A, and moved to Paris and lived there for a couple of years before settling for London as my base of operations.
  
  For me, fantasy and illusion are not contradictions of reality, but instead an integral part of our everyday lives. There is a real Peter Pan Syndrome at play in my work and I suppose I would consider myself to be a carnival sideshow conceptualist, combining a bare-bones formal conceptualism with an eternally adolescent, prank DIY comic-approach.
  
  Although I am skilled in many disciplines, and often employ a wide variety of different media in my work, it is photography that is at the heart of my practice. At the core of this work is an attention to the flickering, fading definition of our lives as dictated by the computer monitor and the rapid reply of instant messaging. I strive, not to break down these introverted, often self-imposed boundaries, but to look at how dataflow from the virtual realm impacts on the significance and symbolism of real-world human senses. But in doing so, I have begun to generate unexpected questions about how art might be able to inscribe itself on the surface of reality- not to represent itself on the surface of reality –not to represent reality, nor to duplicate it, but to replace it.