Peter Tomka

Despite their size, Peter Tomka’s black-and-white photographic prints feel intimate. They are not mementos to be carried in a pocket close to the heart but inhabiting them visually, brings you close to Tomka’s heart. This results from factors standard to photography: cropping, framing, saturation, and depth of field manipulate the image and the audience. But Tomka’s photographs go further by placing the viewer in media res, where vision is blurred. Hands reach too close, bodies stutter, eyes plead, “Please don’t tell.” The photographs often start as casual pictures. They then undergo a complex analog printing process that he has devised. Using his (blacked-out) one-room apartment as a camera, Tomka projects digital images onto photographic paper using a coatrack as a shutter. The photographs are developed in his bathtub. Sometimes one image can generate numerous photographic iterations. The artist’s intense and time-consuming labor also seems to imprint itself on the image—in the subtle traces of borders misaligning or blacks that are a little soft. All of the many decisions he makes between his footage and the museum’s walls occlude rather than sharpen vision. What’s left is a hazy hallucination. It could be Tomka’s. But the absent details encourage anonymity, and those spaces that have been blurred and veiled can belong to all.

Peter Tomka was born in 1989 in Des Moines. Tomka is a photographer and the founder of the artist-run program No Moon LA. By manipulating rigorous technical and material processes, Tomka creates large-scale—partial, blurred, cropped, and grainy—photographs that are queer in form and content. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Webber Gallery, Paris (2024); O-Town House, Los Angeles (2024); the Fulcrum Press, Los Angeles (2023); and No Moon LA, Los Angeles (2021). Recent group exhibitions include O-Town House, Los Angles (2024, 2023); Galerie Wood, Los Angeles (2024); Webber Gallery, Los Angeles (2024); and Giovanni’s Room, Los Angeles (2023). Performances include L.A. Dance Project (2019) and Human Resources, Los Angeles (2018). Tomka earned a BA at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA (2011), and an MFA at the University of California, Riverside (2020).