Tomira Wilcox

Submerge yourself in Tomira Wilcox's photographic and video storytelling as she tells us tales of her life, identity, and womanhood through her lens as an immigrant and mother in the US.

TARA BLACKWELL is American but lives in North America

Westport, CT

Abstraction

Identity

Her STORY

Tomira Wilcox is a Polish-American conceptual artist using photography to address themes related to identity, everyday life and her lived experience as a woman, immigrant, and mother. Her photography offers stories about her own need to create within the confines of life’s demands and uncertainties. She utilizes her storytelling and compositions to understand her existence and place within current American culture. Her photography and video works also serve as testing environments for Wilcox to explore the depths of pain, mental health, and identity.

As a mathematician, Tomira instinctively looks for a sense of order and balance as she creates simple compositions that evoke deeper emotion. Her study of abstraction is a response to the lack of organization and predictability she experiences in her own daily life, especially present throughout the global pandemic.

Wilcox has most recently augmented her creative lens by exploring video. Her "Distortions and Emotions" series of videos emerged from the pandemic and are extensions of her photography and visual storytelling. These videos explore our post-pandemic reality—the overarching loss and anxiety that permeates our daily lives.

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What we love
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As a former mathematician, Wilcox approaches art with a precision and analytic framework that informs her creations. With close attention to detail and carefully honed skills, her conceptual art is constantly evolving. Each exploration takes on a life of its own, whether it is her commercial works or videos. She is a master of color palette and design, creating artful compositions as she spirals you into a her colorful dreamscapes.

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Each of Wilcox's series are comprehensive studies, exploring her themes from multiple perspectives. Like her scenes of water, it is easy to feel submerged in Wilcox's headspace, and in doing so we are able to see the world through her eyes. Through the power of her art and storytelling, we travel through colorful tableaux that help us to connect with our emotions and senses.

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"The experience of flow transports me to a place where space or time cease to exist. It’s not by accident that recurring themes I am drawn to, explore water, reflections, distortions and vivid, dream-like colors.The act of making pictures is equally important as the final images, the prints are essentially the physical manifestations of my experiences as a woman, mother, an immigrant and an artist."

- Tomira Wilcox

IMPACT

MOTHERHOOD, IDENTITY & MENTAL HEALTH

Tomira Wilcox uses her conceptual and artistic process to analyze what it means to have identities that converge and are often in conflict. Her life as both professional artist and mother are not always easy to keep compartmentalizes, as one identity is often bleeding into and distorting the other. It is through her photography, that she reveals how messy and convoluted identity can be. Mental health awareness also plays an part of her scenes, as she utilizes empathy and honesty to connect with her viewers. In experiencing Wilcox's work, she makes us feel that that it's ok to not have everything figured out and that our identities and mental health are constant works in progress.