Tom Radovich: Wonder Room

Gallery Hours
Open to Montserrat community M-F, 10am-5pm or by appointment: [email protected]

Thomas Radovich is the former Associate Director of Admissions and an artist who works in woodcarving, painting, printmaking, and animation to explore topics of nostalgia, memory, and play. His current body of work is a series of wood carvings based off his childhood drawings.

As a child, Radovich created over a thousand figurative drawings on paper that he would transform into paper cut-out figures. He would then integrate the cut-outs into play with other action figures. His grandmother preserved these drawings in a manila folder labeled “Thomas Cut-outs.” The folder of cut-outs grew into a shoebox full of over 1,200 drawings.

Since 2017, Radovich has created carved wood sculptures based on his childhood drawings. In these whimsical wood sculptures, Radovich carefully recreates the details of the original drawings — gloss medium recreates Scotch tape that was used to repair drawings, tears in the original drawing are recreated with a box cutter, and the yellowing of the paper over time is reproduced with diluted acrylic paint.

Radovich’s installation, Wonder Room, presents several hundred of his miniature wood figures. They are displayed on thrifted and vintage shelving units, evoking the imaginative and interior space of an adolescent  bedroom filled with collections and playthings.

After creating hundreds of these wood sculptures, Radovich began creating animations with them including a series of stop-motion animations retelling Dragon Ball Z, a cartoon that he has not seen in two decades, from memory.