Tom Dash American, b. 1975

Born in 1975, Tom Dash works to the beat of his favorite music—fuel and fodder for his art—he borrows from popular culture, producing mixed-media paintings, photographs, sculptures, murals, and installations through which he offers his take on Gen X and Y America. He is inspired by the 1980s and ‘90s, the decades of his youth, and by the art of appropriation, to which he had first-hand exposure while working for Richard Prince from 2005-2011. His own work abounds with images of racecars, pinup girls, and album art, and text from song lyrics and titles of favorite artworks. In his canvases, these motifs appear enlarged and floating against loosely painted backgrounds, or repeated across the picture plane. Dash calls these compositions “post-production paintings,” referring to his privileging of subject matter over technique, with a nod to the post-everything era in which we live. Dash spent summers in high school taking classes at the Rhode Island School of Design and attended classes at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston thereafter. Playing a role in multiple group shows as well as headlining his own solo shows, Dash has been represented by numerous galleries in the past in addition to starting his own, Dos Mil Gallery, based in Portland, Oregon. His residency in Portland proved fruitful has he developed an affiliation with the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art. Dash now resides on the East End of Long Island, New York, where he has maintained his residence since 2004.