Thomas Tait is an installation and performance artist. Recently, their works involve dense, fragile, and kinetic sculptures created from found and organic matter, repurposed electronics, and synthetic materials, and often centralize puppetry as a means by which to think about our affectual relationship with the non-human. Other works are fascinated with systems; yet rather than offering any type of logical sequence or progression, the technologies in Tait’s work favor slowness, repetition, and nonlinear connection, dissociating themselves from any productive use or value. Instead, they create contingent networks that emphasize unexpected outcomes, small transformations of form, and strange collaborations or harmonies. Fragile, ephemeral, and nuanced, these works also present allegories for living practices of connection: unconventional kinships that join in proximal relation categorically differentiated spaces.
Thomas Tait is a multidisciplinary artist born in 1991. Having initially studied Comparative Literature, Tait began their practice in performance in 2015 in Brooklyn’s underground scene, using a theatrical setup of costumes, music, narrative texts, and performing objects.Tait's practice has evolved over the years to include video, installation, handmade machines, sound, text, and live performance, and explores a broad range of influences from theater, literature, queer theory, technology, animism, and low-tech or obsolete culture – to nurture allegorical narratives based on relationships and exchanges between worlds expected to be ontologically separate. Tait received an MFA from Hunter College in 2024, and is a recent recipient of a fellowship to participate in the SOMA program in Mexico City.
