Torey Thornton Some Narrow Sleeping

Torey Thornton’s exhibition, titled Some Narrow Sleeping, presents a group of paintings depicting content that articulates a visual concept falling on a spectrum between realism and abstraction. His straightforward medium emphasizes the flatness of surface and his approach at rendering imagery exaggerates the crudeness of his forms. Inspired by collage and readily accessible material, Thornton’s narratives break tradition through idiosyncratic arrangements and refined simplicity.

For the past year, the artist has been concerned with the idea of perception – how the mind perceives an image. Thornton’s new work involves visual manipulations of scale and perspective, which inherently confuse interpretation – what might appear as a horizon line to one person could look like a tabletop to another. For instance, he may place a car on a “horizon” line next to a bowl of fruit. Is it a toy car, or is the fruit bowl gigantic?

Thornton’s work opens a dialogue by his introduction of certain forms and colors; the interaction of seemingly impulsive combinations causes the mind to react. Through scale shifts, morphing of shapes, and presenting chromatic anomalies, a visual tension arises. Familiar imagery becomes questionable – is it objective or subjective? The artist employs purposeful confusion. Using calculated distortion alongside a liberated method, his binary compositions trigger what the mind wants to see, versus what may be actually present.