Tyler Thomas Rowland is an artist living and working in New York City. 

After 25 years of working in sculpture, installation, and live art, I decided it was time for a big schism in my art practice—to leave all my previous artworks and art ideas behind—and now I am starting completely from scratch. Over the last year, I went back to the basics—sketching, journaling, drawing, and painting—basically resetting and rebooting my art brain’s operating system because I wanted to reprogram how I feel when making (and thinking about) art in and out of the studio. Feelings, color, abstraction, and the fuzzy immediacy of airbrushing has allowed me to loosen up and focus on the images, surfaces, and patterns that I want to make.

Currently, I am thinking a lot about inversion—not only turning things upside down but also reversing orientation and inverting meaning.  

Can a pair of 1980’s sunglasses morph into a narrow 18th-century masonry bridge? Or is it the bridge that transforms into the sunglasses? Can a landscape painting also be a still life and also a portrait? Can things turn into themselves? Or become bridges to new experiences?

I want to make art that crisscrosses or cuts diagonally through images and ideas.