Thomas Arthur Schaefer | Contemporary Multimedia Artist

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THOMAS ARTHUR SCHAEFER

Signal Repeats Source — 2026 Tabloid, paper, tissue paper, acrylic, and ink on 110lb cardstock 11 x 8.5 in / 27.9 x 21.6 cm 2026_DRW_0004

Signal Repeats Source operates as a composite image under strain—faces surface, dissolve, and recombine without settling into certainty. The likeness of Lee Harvey Oswald is present, but unstable, sharing visual territory with what may also register as Marilyn Monroe. Identity here is not fixed; it is echoed, mirrored, and distorted through layered material and intersecting line work.

Russian letterforms fold inward, functioning as both signal and decoy. Plated food imagery suggests consumption, preparation, or offering—ideas arranged but not explained. White drips interrupt the surface like erasures or leaks, obscuring as much as they reveal.

The work does not argue for a theory. It stages a condition. Signals repeat. Sources blur. Meaning circulates without resolution. What appears informative may only be distraction—what seems hidden may be the only thing telling the truth.

Signal Repeats Source — 2026 Tabloid, paper, tissue paper, acrylic, and ink on 110lb cardstock 11 x 8.5 in / 27.9 x 21.6 cm 2026_DRW_0004

Signal Repeats Source operates as a composite image under strain—faces surface, dissolve, and recombine without settling into certainty. The likeness of Lee Harvey Oswald is present, but unstable, sharing visual territory with what may also register as Marilyn Monroe. Identity here is not fixed; it is echoed, mirrored, and distorted through layered material and intersecting line work.

Russian letterforms fold inward, functioning as both signal and decoy. Plated food imagery suggests consumption, preparation, or offering—ideas arranged but not explained. White drips interrupt the surface like erasures or leaks, obscuring as much as they reveal.

The work does not argue for a theory. It stages a condition. Signals repeat. Sources blur. Meaning circulates without resolution. What appears informative may only be distraction—what seems hidden may be the only thing telling the truth.

Hey, Kitty Cat — 2026 Tabloid, paper, candy wrappers, tissue paper, acrylic, and ink on 110lb cardstock 11 x 8.5 in / 27.9 x 21.6 cm 2026_DRW_0003

Hey, Kitty Cat is anchored to the knife-edge moment in Chinatown when curiosity becomes injury—when J.J. Gittes quite literally pays for sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong. The work treats that moment not as narrative reference but as principle: intrusion has consequence, and knowledge is rarely neutral.

Red paint splatter functions as both wound and signal, echoing blood without illustrating it. The Dum Dum candy wrappers—half-hidden, half-mocking—introduce a childlike sweetness that curdles into threat, standing in for bait, distraction, and the false innocence that precedes harm. Linear marks and diagrammatic gestures recall investigative mapping, but here they fail to resolve anything; the system records the damage without preventing it.

This is not a cautionary tale about curiosity—it is an acknowledgment of its cost. Power does not announce its boundaries. You discover them only after crossing the line.

Hey, Kitty Cat — 2026 Tabloid, paper, candy wrappers, tissue paper, acrylic, and ink on 110lb cardstock 11 x 8.5 in / 27.9 x 21.6 cm 2026_DRW_0003

Hey, Kitty Cat is anchored to the knife-edge moment in Chinatown when curiosity becomes injury—when J.J. Gittes quite literally pays for sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong. The work treats that moment not as narrative reference but as principle: intrusion has consequence, and knowledge is rarely neutral.

Red paint splatter functions as both wound and signal, echoing blood without illustrating it. The Dum Dum candy wrappers—half-hidden, half-mocking—introduce a childlike sweetness that curdles into threat, standing in for bait, distraction, and the false innocence that precedes harm. Linear marks and diagrammatic gestures recall investigative mapping, but here they fail to resolve anything; the system records the damage without preventing it.

This is not a cautionary tale about curiosity—it is an acknowledgment of its cost. Power does not announce its boundaries. You discover them only after crossing the line.

Absolute Resolve I: Vector — 2026
Tabloid, paper, tissue paper, acrylic, and ink on 110lb cardstock 11 x 8.5 in / 27.9 x 21.6 cm 2026_DRW_0001

Absolute Resolve I: Vector - presents state power as direction rather than judgment. A single American flag—treated as surface, veil, and governing skin—carries a photographic image of federal agents escorting Nicolás Maduro and his wife into custody. The figures remain upright and legible, embedded within the stars and stripes as if absorbed by the symbolic body of the nation itself. The presence of the Star of David within the field of stars introduces a deliberate disturbance: identity folded into national iconography, belief subsumed by authority, history nested inside policy. Overlaid circular forms and linear vectors function as diagrams of intent—systems that define movement without articulating ethics. Resolve, here, is momentum: the moment power selects its direction and commits to motion.

Absolute Resolve I: Vector — 2026
Tabloid, paper, tissue paper, acrylic, and ink on 110lb cardstock 11 x 8.5 in / 27.9 x 21.6 cm 2026_DRW_0001

Absolute Resolve I: Vector - presents state power as direction rather than judgment. A single American flag—treated as surface, veil, and governing skin—carries a photographic image of federal agents escorting Nicolás Maduro and his wife into custody. The figures remain upright and legible, embedded within the stars and stripes as if absorbed by the symbolic body of the nation itself. The presence of the Star of David within the field of stars introduces a deliberate disturbance: identity folded into national iconography, belief subsumed by authority, history nested inside policy. Overlaid circular forms and linear vectors function as diagrams of intent—systems that define movement without articulating ethics. Resolve, here, is momentum: the moment power selects its direction and commits to motion.

Absolute Resolve II: Extraction — 2026
Tabloid, paper, tissue paper, acrylic, and ink on 110lb cardstock 11 x 8.5 in / 27.9 x 21.6 cm 2026_DRW_0002

Absolute Resolve II: Extraction - marks the completion of that movement. The same flag continues across the second panel, now stripped of stars and reduced to red and white stripes—orientation without constellation, authority without celestial reference. The photographic image returns inverted, destabilizing the figures and signaling a shift from intent to procedure. Geometry tightens, circles close, and the composition becomes mechanical rather than declarative. What remains is not ideology but outcome: removal, containment, absence. By dividing a single flag across two works and reversing the image only at the point of extraction, the diptych frames resolve as a process—first aligned, then enacted—where power no longer announces itself, but quietly completes its task.

Absolute Resolve II: Extraction — 2026
Tabloid, paper, tissue paper, acrylic, and ink on 110lb cardstock 11 x 8.5 in / 27.9 x 21.6 cm 2026_DRW_0002

Absolute Resolve II: Extraction - marks the completion of that movement. The same flag continues across the second panel, now stripped of stars and reduced to red and white stripes—orientation without constellation, authority without celestial reference. The photographic image returns inverted, destabilizing the figures and signaling a shift from intent to procedure. Geometry tightens, circles close, and the composition becomes mechanical rather than declarative. What remains is not ideology but outcome: removal, containment, absence. By dividing a single flag across two works and reversing the image only at the point of extraction, the diptych frames resolve as a process—first aligned, then enacted—where power no longer announces itself, but quietly completes its task.

Vesica Nocturna
Oil on panel with cast silver
12 × 12 × 3 in / 30.5 × 30.5 × 7.6 cm
2026
— Dreamscapes: Cosmosis January 10th - 31st, 2026 Limelight Gallery @bindersart @404foundatl   Vesica Nocturna considers creation as a condition rather than an event. The work is constructed across two panels that operate in tension: a nocturnal field that holds order, latency, and law, and a projecting form that suggests emergence without narrative. 
The base panel functions as a vessel—cosmic, interior, and unresolved. Planetary glyphs appear as both trace and object, registering force within the field while remaining inseparable from it. Three elemental forms occupy the upper register, marking origin, measure, and awakening without resolving into allegory. 
The child panel is physically displaced from the field below it, introducing depth, shadow, and parallax. This separation resists fixed orientation and emphasizes becoming over completion. 
Vesica Nocturna reflects on containment, emergence, and interior light—where order precedes understanding, and where the world is continually reborn through revelation rather than division.

Vesica Nocturna
Oil on panel with cast silver
12 × 12 × 3 in / 30.5 × 30.5 × 7.6 cm
2026
— Dreamscapes: Cosmosis January 10th - 31st, 2026 Limelight Gallery @bindersart @404foundatl   Vesica Nocturna considers creation as a condition rather than an event. The work is constructed across two panels that operate in tension: a nocturnal field that holds order, latency, and law, and a projecting form that suggests emergence without narrative. 
The base panel functions as a vessel—cosmic, interior, and unresolved. Planetary glyphs appear as both trace and object, registering force within the field while remaining inseparable from it. Three elemental forms occupy the upper register, marking origin, measure, and awakening without resolving into allegory. 
The child panel is physically displaced from the field below it, introducing depth, shadow, and parallax. This separation resists fixed orientation and emphasizes becoming over completion. 
Vesica Nocturna reflects on containment, emergence, and interior light—where order precedes understanding, and where the world is continually reborn through revelation rather than division.

Shadows cling to edges—
fracturing, bending, split.
Quiet room now sensory.
Cathedral temporarily lit.

Shadows cling to edges—
fracturing, bending, split.
Quiet room now sensory.
Cathedral temporarily lit.

Anatomy of Silence — 2025
Tabloid, paper, tissue paper, medical book illustration, acrylic, tissue paper, and ink on 110lb cardstock 11 x 8.5 in / 27.9 x 21.6 cm 2025_DRW_0011

Anatomy of Silence begins where language collapses. Words and numbers—those engines of persuasion, propaganda, and digital noise—have been surgically excised, leaving only their chromatic ghosts. The dissected tabloid, distorted through scan and motion, becomes a shell of its former message: a residue of image divorced from meaning. Over this emptied surface, the anatomy of a frog emerges—cut, diagrammed, and stripped of its own textual certainty.

In the amphibian’s mute body lingers the archetype of Kek, the Egyptian god of primordial darkness and unseen transformation—a reminder that creation begins in silence, that illumination requires descent. The blue sigil acts as a seal to that threshold: an emblem of containment, invocation, and restraint.

Through this act of erasure, the work reclaims image from ideology. It gestures toward a pre-verbal space where chaos and meaning coexist—where the world’s incessant chatter dissolves into still form, and what remains is the shimmer of potential before the first word was spoken.

Anatomy of Silence — 2025
Tabloid, paper, tissue paper, medical book illustration, acrylic, tissue paper, and ink on 110lb cardstock 11 x 8.5 in / 27.9 x 21.6 cm 2025_DRW_0011

Anatomy of Silence begins where language collapses. Words and numbers—those engines of persuasion, propaganda, and digital noise—have been surgically excised, leaving only their chromatic ghosts. The dissected tabloid, distorted through scan and motion, becomes a shell of its former message: a residue of image divorced from meaning. Over this emptied surface, the anatomy of a frog emerges—cut, diagrammed, and stripped of its own textual certainty.

In the amphibian’s mute body lingers the archetype of Kek, the Egyptian god of primordial darkness and unseen transformation—a reminder that creation begins in silence, that illumination requires descent. The blue sigil acts as a seal to that threshold: an emblem of containment, invocation, and restraint.

Through this act of erasure, the work reclaims image from ideology. It gestures toward a pre-verbal space where chaos and meaning coexist—where the world’s incessant chatter dissolves into still form, and what remains is the shimmer of potential before the first word was spoken.

Letter to an Ancestor — 2025
Tabloid, paper, tissue paper, stamps, acrylic, packaging, cigarette paper and ink on 110lb cardstock 11 x 8.5 in / 27.9 x 21.6 cm 2025_DRW_0010

—
Letter to an Ancestor drifts between memory and machinery, tracing a lineage through dots, postmarks, and printed code. Buried within the halftone field is a smiling man—an inherited signal, a ghost in the matrix of reproduction.

The collage folds together notions of correspondence, industry, and bloodline: how messages, like genes, are endlessly copied and re-sent. Gold lines act as conduits of transmission and reverence, bridging the mechanical and the sacred. It’s a small act of communication across time—addressed backward, but still somehow in transit.

Letter to an Ancestor — 2025
Tabloid, paper, tissue paper, stamps, acrylic, packaging, cigarette paper and ink on 110lb cardstock 11 x 8.5 in / 27.9 x 21.6 cm 2025_DRW_0010

—
Letter to an Ancestor drifts between memory and machinery, tracing a lineage through dots, postmarks, and printed code. Buried within the halftone field is a smiling man—an inherited signal, a ghost in the matrix of reproduction.

The collage folds together notions of correspondence, industry, and bloodline: how messages, like genes, are endlessly copied and re-sent. Gold lines act as conduits of transmission and reverence, bridging the mechanical and the sacred. It’s a small act of communication across time—addressed backward, but still somehow in transit.

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