City Hall Gallery Opening Reception: "The Long Years"
The Public Arts Commission is thrilled to announce the newest City Hall Gallery exhibit, "The Long Years," by San Diego-based multimedia artist Christopher Lloyd Tucker. Tucker's distinctive artistic blend of woodwork, metalwork, and digital art is showcased in his recent creations, where he transforms digital drawings into three-dimensions by assembling laser-cut exotic hardwoods or multicolored acrylic sheets into mosaic-like artworks, elegantly framed within hardwood. The exhibit will be open from May 1st through June 30th.
Come to meet the artist at a special opening reception will held on Saturday, May 4th, from 2:00-4:00 PM.
Artist Statement
Christopher Lloyd Tucker is a San Diego based multimedia artist who specializes in combining woodwork, metalwork, and digital art. Tucker thrives in situations that involve hands-on problem solving and exploring new materials, and his body of work reflects that, integrating new approaches and new media with each new phase of life.
While spending a great deal of his artistic career working in abstraction, Tucker has recently embraced more socially engaged versions of realism as a way of responding to our cultural moment. His latest body of work has been largely portrait based, relying on gestures and expressions as a vehicle for social commentary.
Tucker’s recent work has been an adaptation of digital drawing into three dimensions, with a thematic focus on the relationship of the human face and figure (and of marginalized and minoritized faces and figures in particular). The pieces submitted all began the same way, as a digital sculpture. They were then rendered and converted into a more simplified vector image. They were laser cut from a collection of exotic hardwoods or multicolored acrylic sheets, and puzzled back together into a two-dimensional mosaic-like artwork, and framed in a hardwood.
About the Artist
Hi! I'm Christopher Lloyd Tucker. I'm a San Diego based multimedia artist, and these days I specialize in woodwork, metalwork, and digital art. I had the good fortune to be born and raised in Chicago, by hippie parents, and in one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the country. I started drawing in grade school, copying comic books.
When I was in my teens, I was lucky to receive a scholarship to transfer to an arts high school where I got access to a range of tools and approaches, and a community of artists and performers to be inspired by. After spending a few years there and then a year at an arts college, I ran into the hard reality that being an artist went a lot more smoothly if you came from money (which I did not). I ended up dropping out and finding ways to make a living in a way that were sort-of-art-adjacent. I was a jeweler's assistant, a freelance illustrator and designer, a sculpture teacher or assistant at various Chicago community centers. Those pursuits were all good in their own ways and have allowed me to build up a broad range of skills, but I was always frustrated that I could not put all of my energy and time into building an artistic practice. I eventually went back to school and finished with a degree in animation.
Since moving to San Diego I have been lucky enough to work out of Maketory, a local maker space, and have learned an enormous amount from the community there. I have also become a Teaching Artist at A Reason To Survive, in National City, teaching digital media and woodworking to high school students. I’ve had the opportunity to show my work all over the county and have found a new home in the artistic community of San Diego.