About
Rena Tom is a multidisciplinary artist-researcher, curator, and cultural worker. She has always been interested in craft objects, making, and makers, as well as the spaces they inhabit. Her curiosity about people, places, and things has been present throughout twenty years’ experience in the roles of maker, designer, writer, editor, shopkeeper, gallerist, publisher, instructor, and event producer in San Francisco and Brooklyn.
…..
I have a weird fascination with discomfort. The conceptual nature of my research is anchored by the intimate, embodied aspects of craft. I investigate material and immaterial objects as sites where tensions play out to address personal and systemic issues of visibility, privacy, identity, and representation.
Projects
Like Lewis Carroll's Alice, questions about identity abound when working with mirrored surfaces. This is an extension of my research into mirrors. I created a 4’ teleidoscope, which differ from kaleidoscopes in that the source images come from outside the device instead of inside.
Side Projects
Your Package Has Been Delivered consists of photographs of deliveries to my home that I began collecting in 2021 on are.na. While they are throwaway snapshots, meant to be consumed and forgotten, saving and displaying them is a transformative act whereby an elusive archive is made visible, exposing how surveillance capitalism pervades modern life.
A collection of unidentifiable photos of products -- feed photography (algorithmically driven and involuntarily appearing to me on social media) rather than found photography. Devoid of scale or context yet aesthetically and emotionally appealing, how I interpret them is a part of how Facebook/Instagram interprets me. 16 pg, 2-color Riso zine, edition of 20.
Exhibitions
The End of You was an immersive installation, a collaboration of artists invited to join the Experiential Space Research Lab to explore the potential of using experiential environments to create social impact.
Speaking
“Navigating the New Handmade Economy”
Writing
An essay in the form of a class syllabus that defines and explores the concept of fake objects as entities that reconfigure our sense of the real.
An encyclopedia created for a publishing class in my Master’s program in Critical Craft Studies that explored the theme of endings and beginnings and also encompassed thoughts about the closure of the program itself. There are 35 entries of new writing, excerpts of reading done for or outside of class, new work by my cohort and faculty, and two commissioned pieces by the artists Indira Allegra and Kasey Smith.
Education
A very intense low-residency program in: Craft history, theory, and practice. Making, unmaking, remaking. Intention and manifestation. Happenstance and culmination. The tangible and intangible. The special and the everyday. Relationships between people, places, and things.
The program emphasized integration with disciplines like art history, sociology, anthropology, archaeology, material studies, and decorative arts.