The Imaginary Solutions of Thomas Chimes

2007 / 54 min. / color
Directed by Michael Blackwood
Featuring: Thomas Chimes, Michael Taylor, Anne d’Harnoncourt, Philip Mitsis

Filmed at the Philadelphia Museum and Locks Gallery, The Imaginary Solutions of Thomas Chimes presents a conversation with the artist as he reminisces about his career, influences and artistic inuitions. Director of the museum, Anne d’Harnoncourt, joins Chimes to revisit the galleries of Thomas Eakins, Duchamp and Van Gogh, all of whom were deeply influential throughout his artistic journey. Just as many other American artists, Chimes spent time in Paris and discovered writers such as Antonin Artaud, James Joyce and most notably Alfred Jarry, whose writings on pataphysics dominated Chimes’ work for two decades. Chimes’s portraits of Jarry and his intellectual peers are the core of his idiosyncratic work as an artist. Michael Taylor, curator of Chimes’ retrospective exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum, questions him on his progress from his beginnings to his present work.