If you’re on the hunt for new creepy content in time for spooky season, a Greenpoint local has just the book for you.
Artist Thomas Tomczak recently released a new book entitled This Isn’t Heaven, a collection of interviews, photographs, and drawings depicting demonic figures around New York City. Tomczak spoke with a psychoanalyst, a writer, an occultist, and an Assyrian scholar in order to plumb the depths of these entities, real or imagined, subconscious or tangible, that loom large in our collective psyche.
A first-generation Polish American and a lifelong Greenpointer, Tomczak says that the impetus for the project came from a bad breakup.
“I’ve always been drawn to the supernatural and began researching demons—their origins, why they were depicted that way they are, and their role in a cultural landscape,” Tomczak tells Greenpointers. “I set out to document all the depictions of demons I could find in the city. I structured it as a visual research project to focus myself after the breakup.”
The book’s title stems from one of Tomczak’s biggest takeaways from these various conversations, “that life isn’t about being in a perpetual state of bliss, but a constant series of opportunities for growth.”
“Demons are typically characterized by an indiscriminate hunger, they’re not concerned with the damage caused by the pursuit of their desire. It’s not hard to make contemporary analogies about fear and greed having consequences,” Tomczak said.
You can get the book at mwabooks.com. To see more of his work, follow him on Instagram @thomas__tomczak.
Thomas The Artist proclaims that “life“ is not about being in a perpetual state of bliss, but instead, a constant series of opportunities for growth. However that-fertilized rosy outlook (or inlook?) on life as a series of “growth opportunities” inevitably involves a lot of noxious weeds and cancerous growths in the midst of harvests, crop failures, droughts, floods and cruel fortune. Despite all that however, the concept, the very dream of “growth” …is really in the eye & mind of the beholder, isn’t it? We all do have our inner demons – for sure- demons that we need to try to control. lest they control us. Although “they” really are “us”, of course, in our Coney Island fun house mind of mirrors. Art can lead us to look at ourselves from the outside, from beyond ourselves, from outside the perpetual prison of oir own skin and limitations.The caged bird still sings …despite all that. Art, some art, might even help us in that lifelong struggle to become better humans, rather than simply bitter humans. We liv in a world of gods and demons of our own making, in an all-too-human struggle to survive in our all-too-brief moment of time. This, as we try to discover what it really means to be human, That is, if we’re lucky enough to take the time to do so in the midst of all our all consuming struggles, strivings …and “growth”. Perhaps it’s not a question of “growing” outwards and upwards but instead, in the words of poet T.S. Eliot: “We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time ….heard, half-heard, in the stillness Between two waves of the sea”.