Building the Intangible: The Monumental Vision of Chiffon Thomas
Interview by Shelley Holcomb
In his latest exhibition, Progeny, at Michael Kohn Gallery, Chiffon Thomas delves into deeply personal and collective narratives, exploring the intersections of identity, architecture, and history. Through the concept of “impossible bodies,” Thomas weaves together memories of his religious upbringing in Chicago, the complex realities faced by his community, and the mysticism of the lives that came before him. His sculptures, monumental in both scale and symbolism, invite viewers to reflect on the precariousness of marginalized lives, the resilience embedded within them, and the ways in which architecture can embody the human experience.
The fusion of anatomical forms with architectural structures, particularly in his use of columns and pyramids, serves as a powerful metaphor for the human condition. Thomas’s works challenge the viewer to consider how spaces — whether domestic, religious, or monumental — carry the weight of history, power, and oppression. His use of found objects, along with materials like stained glass and silicone, blurs the lines between the body and the built environment, creating a dialogue that is at once visceral and intellectual.
Thomas’s exploration of ecclesiastical imagery and ancient architectural forms is deeply rooted in his own experiences with religion and history, particularly the ways in which colonization and cultural erasure have shaped our understanding of these structures. His work pays homage to the lives and legacies of Black Americans, using the process of lifecasting as a means of preserving and honoring individual and collective histories.
In our conversation, Thomas reveals the layers of thought and emotion that underpin his practice. His sculptures are not merely objects; they are embodiments of the tensions between resilience and fragility, visibility and erasure, the sacred and the profane. As viewers, we are invited to engage with these tensions, to witness the beauty and the pain, and to consider our own place within these narratives.
Shelley Holcomb: You use the term ”impossible bodies” to describe your sculptures in this exhibition. Can you share the personal journey or experiences that led to this concept?
Chiffon Thomas: This came up in my second year of grad school. My work became more sculptural because I became curious about how to integrate found objects, reclaim them, repurpose them, and use them as structures for the body. And many of the figures I was trying to represent were people from my community in Chicago. Especially people from a certain demographic whom I was longing for and who I missed spending time with.
I had lived predominantly in a Black community, and my day-to-day had a lot to do with interacting with Black people who were members of a religion that I was raised within. As a result, I saw not only organized religion as oppressive but also the environment and social aspects of my life in Chicago. And within this circle of people relating to one another, there was also so much poverty and lack of access to resources. Once I left Chicago and went to grad school, my world became a lot broader in the way that I began to think and the people that I began to engage with academically, like my professors and my cohort. And any time I would reconnect with my family back in Chicago, they would update me on a difficulty they were facing, mostly financially. And it was very jarring. It was like this contrasting experience I was having with being in school and being in this bubble of academia, creativity, and progressive thinkers. But at the same time, it reminded me of what my family was dealing with back home, like not being able to get a business loan or not being able to move forward in any way. There was always some kind of blockade dealing with just never having anything financially, like any type of generational wealth, not being educated, or being very dependent on faith, religion and not having enough exposure and curiosity about the world. This is a disposition that I can and did understand because it’s very comforting when I go back to Chicago to be amongst my origin, to be amongst people that sound like me, to be amongst people that I feel seen and familiar with. Still, it also felt extremely limiting to my potential as an artist and having the foresight to do more.
So it started from that, like this body that is so precarious to its environment, it’s so dependent and complacent and compliant within it, but also unable to elevate itself. It’s not able to gain things from its environment, like pull resources from it, or there may not be any resources for it to even pull. So I make the bodies precarious in this way they look like they have the potential to have full mobility, but then, you start to recognize that certain parts are missing, have been cropped off, pinched together or blocked, obscured in some way, or replaced with columns and other architecture designs I’ve been exploring.
I’m examining how architectural elements from the environment build the body while simultaneously suppressing it.
I began to look at columns as an architectural element in this way, which is something that I started to investigate during my time in grad school at Yale. I was on the East Coast for the first time, and it was my first encounter with many of these colonial and Victorian-style homes and mansions that had been converted into low-income apartment complexes. You could tell that the origin was from the 1800s, and they had probably housed a single family back then. So to me, the fact that they have been converted into these low-income homes was a representation of “white flight” over time and migration. The significance of the design of that home is that it carries a particular social class structure with the ornate designs or the fluted columns attached to them. And then, for these mansions to now be inhabited by this contemporary generation of life who cannot afford the entire structure or even begin to generate wealth, it felt like that object was this oppressive symbol of my own reality.
I thought, how can I reclaim it and also make it contingent on the present by allowing it to give me structure but also turn on itself? Sometimes, the columns I build upon are actually made out of solid wood, and sometimes, I duplicate the column and make it out of plaster or hydrocal. I started to weaken this object’s material, and I would copy it many times. It would be incredibly heavy and appear to be very dense, but it could break easily if something were to hit or chip at it. So it was this oscillation between something dense but also something fragile. The idea was for it to appear that it has the capacity to be indestructible or has great resilience, but that is just not the case. And I think that that’s how marginalized groups are very often stereotyped, that they have this resiliency or otherworldly or non-human capability of existing in the world where people fear them or the unknown; people fear what they are ignorant of. So yeah, it’s between those thoughts that I often find this kind of antithesis between two opposing ideas coming together.
Shelley Holcomb: The use of anatomical forms to construct freestanding pyramids is a striking aspect of the exhibition. You state, “I want skin to perform as architecture and architecture to perform something bodily.” What draws you to this fusion of the human body with ancient structures?
Chiffon Thomas: Yeah, this exhibition is different from the previous exhibitions. I’m still dealing with the body and architecture, how we inhabit space, and how we attach purpose to space and architecture. Whether it is a domestic space, a political building, or a site for sanctity, worship, or faith, that’s been where my investigation has been focused and how people hurd, collect or gather in spaces. With these ideas in mind I started to think about what rules are given and assigned to monuments.
Like why do we erect monuments? Why do we do that as humans as a species? Why do we memorialize the dead and commemorate the dead?
And that is something that I think is very beautiful, that we as a species go out of our way to honor life and those that we have lost and how we revisit sites to remember. A lot of the monuments around the world are used to symbolize a tragic loss and sometimes used as an idol or object of remembrance often so that we as a society refrain from re-enacting great violence or acts and events that eradicate and devalue life. But in this country in particular, a lot of the monuments specifically honoring the Civil War are not to honor the purpose of the Civil War, but they honor leaders of Confederate states, which makes you wonder how are we interested in making effective and political change as a society if we refuse to confront the very foundation and infrastructure of this country’s economic development over 400 years. I thought about what it means to make a monument of so much anonymous life here and to acknowledge specifically Black people in America or people of the African diaspora that happened to be around me. And what is the genetic coding that they carried? When I look at Black people standing in front of me today, I wonder about who their ancestors were who must have been so powerful and impenetrable, strong and resilient enough that they managed to have a contemporary within their lineage or legacy living today? It’s remarkable how they have an ancestor that survived the slave trade.
So that’s how this idea around these obelisks came to be. I was figuring out how to represent the human body as this armature for architecture and an armature for the monument. Human beings are the interior structures for monuments. We desire to see it. We use them to honor life, respect life, and respect events that teach us lessons on how we can change or be changed. We even use monuments or statues of historical figures to imply their significance. I wanted to approach these large structures from this very lens representing the significance of Black life generationally. So, all of the feet at the base of that structure came from individual Black friends; some are my family members, and some are people I had just met. I asked them if they wanted to be a part of this monument to pay homage to their ancestry and themselves so that they could be concretized and immortalized in a way.
The foot has such a substantial individual print, it’s not duplicated. It’s one of a kind.
Shelley Holcomb: Can you describe the process of lifecasting the feet used in your sculptures? And what does this physical engagement add to your practice?
Chiffon Thomas: Yeah, I think that, altogether, there were 13 people who participated, and I would spend a day with them. I initially sent them drawings of what I wanted to create. I thought exposing your foot was such a vulnerable experience. It has so much humility tied to it, just like many biblical references, like washing of the feet or “if my feet or my hand should stumble,” many scriptures tie back to the use of the feet and the hands. So I would invite a person to come over to my studio at the time, and I would tell them, I would like to cast a copy of your feet, I would like to keep a copy, and I would like to give you a copy as a thank you. It will be made of a material that looks similar to concrete, but it is actually hydrocal. So I would have the person sit down, reveal their feet, take them out of their shoes, and then we would have a conversation as they dip their feet into this bucket of alginate. As the alginate was curing, if I knew them, I would just talk to them about stuff that was going on or things that we did in the past. But if I didn’t know them, I would ask them what type of things they were interested in or if they knew anything about their family history. I would ask them a bunch of different questions and hang out with them. That allowed me to not be so insular in my studio and isolated because I tend to go inward when working. I can spend long periods without seeing people. I also hadn’t been living in L.A. for that long, and I felt like it had to be some way that I wasn’t just working all the time in the studio alone. So, it challenged me to open up my practice and myself to people. They had to be vulnerable, and I also had to be vulnerable with my practice. How can I bring other people around me into some of this work and pay respect to them and their lineage?
Shelley Holcomb: The description of your exhibition highlights your fascination with ecclesiastical imagery, which suggests a deep-rooted influence from a religious upbringing. Could you elaborate on this and how it shapes your work today?
Chiffon Thomas: I was contending with two different themes. I was contending with this idea around the monument, and I became very interested in pyramids of different styles, like those in Mexico and Egypt. The pyramids in Mexico, Tenochtitlan, specifically the Ziggurat pyramids, were fascinating because they were stairs stacked up. And then, compared to the ancient Egyptian pyramids, which were a lot earlier, they have a different approach, creating a large base that tapers upward. The entire structure is just sleek walls, which is incredibly complex. And they both serve two distinct purposes. The Egyptian pyramids were used to house the tombs of the pharaohs, allowing them to access a spiritual realm after death while also allowing them access to the mortal world. They could hang out in their pyramid with their things while also being able to exit and go into the immortal or spiritual realm. I thought that that was amazing and comforting. And the pyramids in Mexico were used for religious or ceremonial purposes. Many of the columns we see, like Roman columns, are influenced by Egyptian architecture. This convergence of culture was where this idea around the stained glass started to embed itself into many of these motifs that felt like Egyptian pharaohs and even the obelisks themselves. I pulled that from monuments within ancient Egypt, which we still use that form to erect contemporary monuments. I inverted the obelisk to give it precarity and inverted the point, which is typically aimed upwards towards the sky, to direct attention towards the heavens and the afterlife, by inverting the point to aim towards the Earth, I wanted to think about life that had been happening here or current life here in the present day. Contemporary life always references its past ancestry, so in a sense the inverted obelisks consider both the afterlife and current life. Bringing that point back down to the earth was a reflection of that.
I was inspired by both of those designs and became even more interested in ancient Egypt. Like, what was the fall of Egypt? What happened? The Romans conquered Egypt and brought Christian beliefs to the Egyptians. A lot of their practices became basically demonized, and society violently forced civilizations to convert to Christianity, the same with Mexico being colonized by Spain, forcing them into Catholicism. Thinking about the afterlife is often something a lot of organized religious groups use as a way to control people, like a way to justify morality and immorality or to construct principles. Where will you go after you die? Are you going to heaven? Are you going to be reincarnated? It’s an unknown event that happens, and organized religions prey on that vulnerability we all have.
Shelley Holcomb: It’s like what they did in Mexico with the La Virgen de Guadalupe. They fused part of their Indigenous beliefs with the notion of a brown-skinned Mary figure, which was critical to the eventual conversion of millions of Indigenous people to Roman Catholicism, like a Trojan horse.
Chiffon Thomas: Exactly. But you can’t completely eradicate a people’s traditions or practices. I mean, they have done a great job at it, but there are still things that you gravitate to innately. Something that’s been passed down genetically that you understand. Certain practices feel like they don’t have actual reasoning behind them, but they make sense intuitively. Like some kind of internalized cultivated history in the body. For example, music and creativity are something I inherited from my parents, and I wasn’t exposed to a lot of music or art in my upbringing. So that’s where a lot of the biblical references come from for me, and with that being my personal experience, but also thinking about how civilizations have been conquered and colonized and a lot of their practices demonized and claimed to be pagan practices as an effort to use Christianity or Catholicism as propaganda.
Shelley Holcomb: Expanding on my previous question, there are two works in the show where you utilize stained glass and what looks like patches of silicon skin that have been stitched together. One work places the skin central to the piece, and the other places the stained glass at the center, both resembling freestanding star formations. Can you explain the intention behind these two works as well as the significance of the installation that we see them in?
Chiffon Thomas: These two abstract geometrical structures came about from my trying to imply elements of the body using alternative materials that have similar qualities to the body, like even thinking of the stained glass being this lens or being this translucent material that is able to allow light to pass through or peer through to make something visually present to us, whether it’s imagery or whether it’s just some kind of a motif or design that the stained glass presents and reveals. Our eye operates in the same way; it’s the same mechanics of what that glass is supposed to be doing in an architectural design. And I was trying to make the dichotomy of those two things come into one. And one singular entity.
The translucency of the glass also relates to that of the human skin and its many layers, but if the skin is thin enough or doesn’t have a lot of melanin, you can see that it is also translucent. To feel architectural, but to be using something that is biological. To do the same thing that this architectural material is doing. They oscillate between one another, so the framing of one of these geometric sculptures that are in that installation has stained glass coating it, and then the interior is silicone stitching that concaves inward. And that concaving was really important to me because I wanted to show with the second iteration of that, the second iteration has silicone framing the entire perimeter of that shape, and then the glass concaves in. I wanted to show the relative qualities of the two materials. Like what we think something doesn’t have the capacity to do, it actually can do it. And I don’t know what those objects truly are; they feel like something that is this transported thing or even this evolved structure from accumulated life and events all occurring at the same time that it feels like a black hole to me, or it kind of feels like a portal in some way, like a pulling inward. That’s why it’s concave, like it’s pulling into itself. It’s symbiotic in its duality and plurality.
And to me, this this is the symbiotic way that we connect back to our habitat. It’s one and the same thing. On one hand, we depend on shelter, we depend on buildings, we depend on structures to give us direction, give us purpose, give us protection, and give us meaning. On the other hand, without us, the structure wouldn’t exist. I’m also thinking about how we form place and how we are the markers of that. That’s what I wanted those two things to feel like as well as feel like something otherworldly.
That whole room is really weighted for me. I struggle to put language to it because it’s such a sensorial experience. Going into that room and seeing this collectivity of feet is confusing to witness because, at one point, it looks like a pile of rubble. And then when you get closer, you see that even the smaller quantity of accumulated material is actually small feet. It oscillates between life-scale feet and the smaller feet to represent the impact of humanity’s actions upon one another and how it often goes unacknowledged no matter how great or how small, we are all impacted by others around us or who have lived before us. Again, I keep coming back to this idea about unacknowledged life that has been so impactful.
It’s also more, metaphorically speaking, about human behavior, loss of value, and imbuing value into objects and just how we as a species detect value. The feet are pouring out of the wall, so it makes you wonder, is the entire interior of that gallery full of feet, is it a collection of discarded life or collective life that allows it to function, breath, operate? Furthermore, how do you have these spaces that are so driven alongside capitalism without disenfranchised life being the carriers of the brunt of how it all came to be and operates? And it’s really hard for me to put into language because I’m being confronted with the art world and my place in it. I’m being confronted with my position in this country. I’m being confronted with a lot of lost history. And then I’ve got this representation of all of these lives that have been lost or that I don’t know about, or a lot of ancestral history that I’ll never know about. I feel like visitors are confronted with that when entering that gallery, and there is an unspoken understanding.
Shelley Holcomb: That makes a lot of sense. The faces and bodily structures in your exhibition feel very alien-like and celestial. I’ve read that you like working with geodesic domes, obelisks, and pyramids because of their connection to unknown worlds. Can you speak more about this and how the sculptures in your current exhibition are a continuation of this exploration? What’s your inspiration?
Chiffon Thomas: I’m heavily influenced by science fiction. I’ve read a lot of Octavia Butler’s novels, and I’m always able to visually pull something that manifests in my thoughts of what something might look like from her writing, and then I build even larger worlds off of maybe one thing that she would describe. And I love H.R. Giger. I love all of the Alien films so much. Like his ideas around tucking the Xenomorph into the ship, how the ship and the species are, one entity, symbiotic like that, they are dependent on one another. How is it that this vessel has carved out space for this creature to fit into and be protected by it so perfectly, so neatly?
Shelley Holcomb: But that sounds exactly like what you’re saying about your view of architecture, in general, and even the installation of feet that you’ve created in your exhibition.
Chiffon Thomas: Yes. That’s kind of just how my mind works, there are things that I really enjoy and I feel are just so incredibly creative that I’m able to pull from. And I’m very heavily influenced by his design. And even watched a documentary on him some years ago and how he gave himself the liberty and the freedom to allow cultures to collide with one another. I remember, there was a quote of his saying that he didn’t just steal from any culture, he stole from all of them. Which sounds like it might be a controversial comment, but I just think that it was super beautiful that he didn’t close himself off from realizing the beauty of the world. A lot of his designs came from ancient Egyptian artifacts and imagery. That actually influenced me to look into Egyptology for this show because I also agree with him and think about how this civilization had an incredible aesthetic and the embellishment and representation of ancient pharaohs and how they adorn their hair to look like crowns. A lot of that led me to look at ancient African practices to beautify or create identity markers by how the body is worn. Through this, I got really invested in ancient African hairstyles. That’s how those different faces came to be in the show, they all were influenced by traditional African hairstyles, and a lot of these same styles are often represented in the depictions of ancient Egyptian Pharaohs and their crowns. I was comparing ancient Egyptian crowns to ancient African hairstyles, and they are one and the same.
And there’s often a real intent to try to erase the fact that African people existed in Egypt, which made me even more interested in how Egyptologists try to make this such a mysterious society. And what Egyptologists refuse to do is to connect the actual origins of ancient Egyptians to Africa. And that’s why ancient Egypt feels so otherworldly, and it feels like the information can be inexplicable. So the faces in the exhibition look alien, but they actually are like a combination of ancient Egypt and H.R. Geiger’s influence with the darker palettes that he used, as well as having this duality between that industrial dark steel and bronze juxtaposed against the brightness of the stained glass.
Shelley Holcomb: I read that your work often deals with themes of trauma and collective repair. How would you say your structures in this exhibition perform this, and what would you hope for us as viewers to take away from it?
Chiffon Thomas: I’m still trying to process this show. It’s not something that’s tangible just yet. You start with the show by witnessing these many rusted feet that are spilling out of what I designed to be a representation of a slave ship from the Middle Passage. Then you’re confronted with this ship being so packed to the point that it has a trail behind it. It’s hovering, and it’s trailing lost life that has spilled out or even escaped. But then, on the opposite sides of this slave ship, you have this beautiful monument that is empowering and dependent on the collectivity of these feet balancing on one another. So you have this really jarring reference to a traumatic event in history that we are still paying the price for. But then you also are being confronted with that same version of that life scaled up and used to honor their lives. So, it’s the dichotomy between those two things. Like they both happened, they both are happening at the same time. And I feel like that is what trauma is, currently, intergenerationally, it’s constantly colliding with an effect, cause, and effect, cause and effect. And then sometimes the effect, like the result of it, is not always something traumatic, the pattern can be broken or seen from a different perspective. It’s actually something that could be quite remarkable, or it could be something in overcoming the trauma that transcends or transforms a being.
Chiffon Thomas ‘Progeny’ is on view at Michael Kohn Gallery through August 17, 2024. More info here.
All images courtesy of Michael Kohn Gallery
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