Kevin Tomas

MFA Graphic Design

Sites of Departure

At all scales of human history, there exists a record: the story of how things came to be. An infinity of interconnected traces that thread the intimate and the immense into a single fabric.

Beginning from distinct points of entry, Sites of Departure explores the axes of resolution and scale in documentation, asking what becomes visible when the instruments of the dominant record are set aside. Moving between recovery and confrontation, the work questions the structures that produce our understanding, while creating new documents for future interpretation—all against the reality that to make a claim, is to claim some truth.

Through the work, Sites of Departure gestures toward a practice engaged with its position, deliberate in its medium, and accountable to the histories it enters. Offered not as a conclusion, but as one side of an unfolding conversation, ready to sit down with the generations that follow.

Restaurant window reflection showing a order number and a Coke bottle, black and white photography with brick facade.

The East Side Revisited

Photograph from documentary photo project The East Side Revisited.

3D render of an installation proposal juxtaposing preserved archival rural photographs with distorted, high-contrast versions of the same images.

Installation proposal "shed” composited next to collaged image for an untitled project about the embedded histories in Hideout, UT.

Publication pages showing contemporary color photograph of patriotic mailbox alongside archival black and white images of new york city following 9/11, a vigil, and a space shuttle taking off.

At The Seams

Selected spreads from At The Seams, a publication exploring the history and meanings of the American flag.

Gallery installation featuring an accordion style book, which has been folded out to create a cross-pattern wall display of photographs which flow onto the gallery floor.

Book page with bright yellow background featuring abstract black geometric design composed of fragmented shapes resembling a flower.

In Bloom

Accordion publication and selected page from a generative form making publication, part of the series In Bloom, a project exploring personal, familial, and cultural lineages.

Archival display objects: vintage metal frames holding historical sepia photographs, hinged document case with record card, and scattered overlapping color prints arranged in tiled patterns.

A untitled piece from the series Not Papa, showing family images, and HSPA laborer contract cards from the Hawaiian sugar plantations in the early 1920s.