The Fears of White Men by Tate Foley - SOLD OUT!

Artist Bio

After earning degrees from Lycoming College and the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia, Tate Foley joined the faculty as an Assistant Professor of Art at the Department of Art + Design at Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri. He was awarded the Southern Graphics Council International Grant and Fellowship Award in 2009. His prints, photographs, artist’s books and zines are currently being exhibited all over the country.

Artist Statement 

Text flourishes as the center of my work. Language is used to engage the viewer and to encourage dualistic thinking. My work strives to force viewers to not be swayed to one side or another of a social, political, or economic wall, but to simply meditate on the idea and to choose a side for them to take. Both traditional and contemporary printmaking processes, along with a constantly-focused eye for design serve as the hub of my work. A print’s construction and form work to break it out of its boundaries and to establish the print itself as an object. I use the form of a diptych to explore similarities between dissimilar objects, asking the viewer to question the reasons for such constructions, evaluate the absurdity of ideas, and form their own opinions about those ideas. The monumental task of defining a culture through the processes of appropriation and satire are the pinnacle of my work. Here, arrangement and conglomeration of signifiers work to discover cross-cultural similarities and solidify ideas. However, it must be understood that a definition is a sum of its parts and can only be arrived at after intense investigation. There is a realization that through investigation and research aimed at defining a culture that the definition (the discovered end) is actually absurd and abstract, and in fact the means (in this case, the works created), serve as the definition itself. A collaborative and cooperative model must be taken into account as the underlying reason for discovering this definition of contemporary culture. As Julie Sanders puts forth, through use of appropriation and adaptation, culture can be lead into a higher understanding of itself. My cooperative model uses previously learned and investigated ideas, meshed with contemporary concepts to reach new, enlightened ideas. Essentially, that is the reason for a need for discovery of a definition (utter consciousness of ourselves). Why define contemporary culture? To lead us to a higher knowledge of ourselves.