A focused consumer and avid collector, Timothy Buckwalter uses his vast knowledge of American culture and music as starting points for his work.
Images from magazines, cartoons and films and lines from contemporary songs and novels are blended together to form Buckwalter's work, creating objects that explore the enormous expanses and intimate crevices of male identity.
Believing that no commercial work is outside the reach of artistic reclamation, Buckwalter forages around the ever-expanding internet as well as his personal library of books and periodicals – repositories of shared cultural memories and buried utopian futures – to create narratives of how contemporary Western man administers his anxieties, desires, anger, joys and fears.
Buckwalter’s paintings and sculptures are often built of several inter-related components, either images or objects, in an attempt to create a less ambiguous story and as a way of connecting the dots of our recent past. A found photograph can be used to modify a torn page from a magazine, creating a specific visual rhyme. A repainted New Yorker-style cartoon paired with an enlarged video screenshot can bounce off a denigrated photocopy to unspool an ocular poem.
In Buckwalter’s elegiac work, he is a historian of a future that no longer exists.
