About
Tad Gloeckler. Photo by Gretchen Olson.
Tad Gloeckler is an award winning artist/architect/designer whose work inhabits the overlap between art and design, first engaging people in subtle ways through its surface harmlessness followed by gentle cues that reveal a darker underside in both the work and our selves. He incorporates elements of sculpture, industrial design, performance, furniture design, ritual, graphic design, landscape, non-static forms and jewelry/metals into complex assemblages, using a range of techniques from hand carving to industrial computerized milling.
Tad Gloeckler has been recognized as a leader in creative scholarship within the Interior Design Educators' Council (IDEC), receiving four major awards in the last five years for his multilayered critical art objects during their annual blind peer reviewed international Creative Scholarship competition. During that same time period he also received a First Award in the annual Florida International Competition at Florida State University. In addition to the awards, Tad has helped shape the way art is valued as an alternative to client oriented design work as creative scholarship within IDEC, consistently presenting his work and its implications for creative scholarship to the larger body of interior design educators at both international and regional conferences as well as through publication in academic journals. Tad also has a string of awards and publications for his architecture and interior design work that stretches back twenty years; while exhibition and publication are standard annual activities for artists, architects consider themselves fortunate to have even a few exhibitions or publications over their entire careers. He also consistently shows his work in national juried art venues as well as invited gallery exhibits.
Tad's current work is about encouraging people to look at the world around them in new ways, questioning assumptions that are often buried so deep they appear to be truths. His output has ranged from delicate finger scale jewelry to city scale master plans. Throughout it all Tad seldom deviates from an emphasis on developing multilayered narrative concepts, writing about those concepts, executing meticulous craft and detailing, involving the human body and pushing absurdity so far that it almost resembles truth before dissolving back into absurdity. The major recurring theme in Tad's work is an examination of our need to mediate experiences with nature through objects, and the way those objects demand so much attention that the purported use of the object becomes secondary or even irrelevant.
Tad’s multidisciplinary creative approach is informed by diverse life experiences and education, spending significant periods focused on specialized areas that include landscape and natural resources, furniture and woodworking, architecture and planning, art, graphic design and interior design.
Tad Gloeckler’s work resembles furniture, jewelry or architecture in the same way that Lewis Carroll's "Hunting of the Snark" resembles children's literature; it can be appreciated as a light hearted diversion at first, but with successive readings it reveals a dark and critical underside that makes us stop and wonder which other of our diversions might not be so lighthearted as well. Each time we look again, there is another layer just beneath the surface whispering in our ear.