Tom Pazderka is a Czech American painter, installation artist, writer, and curator. His work interrogates ideology, nostalgia, loss, and belonging using a black-and-white palette of ash and oil. Pazderka’s solo exhibitions include Gallery 825 (Los Angeles, CA), Bender Gallery (Asheville, NC), Silo118 (Santa Barbara, CA) and The Basic Premise (Ojai, CA) with group exhibitions at Santa Monica Art Museum, Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, Bardo Fine and Performing Arts Center in Cullowhee, NC, Sullivan Goss Gallery in Santa Barbara, Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts in Ojai and the Santa Barbara Center for Art Science and Technology
As Curator for the Santa Barbara County Office of Arts and Culture, Tom engages the county community and artists to produce and exhibit art in public spaces and galleries. Prior to serving as County Office of Arts and Culture Curator, he served as our Lead Preparator and Exhibitions Designer since 2017. He also held significant roles with the UCSB Art, Design and Architecture Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara.
His artwork has been reviewed and published in LA Weekly, New American Paintings, Dark Mountain, Santa Barbara Literary Journal and Daily Serving, among others. His writing has been featured in The Philosophical Salon, Sublation Magazine, and 3:AM Magazine. He is the founding contributor and continues to write for LUM Art Magazine.
Tom earned his B.F.A. from Western Carolina University and his M.F.A. from UCSB.
In 2016 I began photographing and collecting ash of local California wildfires. Combining ash with white oil paint on wood panels that I charred with torches, I painted the pyrocumulous ash clouds produced by the fires. Applied in thin layers, systematically, over long periods of time, the images emerge out of the ashy abyss.
Following the fire ‘portraits,’ I began to paint old family photos, coinciding with my mother’s return to the Czech Republic to care for her aging parents. A quarter of a century of her life in America disappeared. Somewhere.
Building these images in ash became an investigation - into my family, belonging, memory, nostalgia, politics, oppression, grief, exile, exclusion, failure, the uncanny, and the sublime – and of painting itself, because it is painting that saved my life many times over in the past. Painting is where I am ‘at home.’
Web: www.tompazderka.com
Substack: tompazderka.substack.com
Instagram: @Tompazderka
Twitter/X: @PazderkaTom
