A Tacoma Artist Is Building Something Strange Inside TAM

Something unusual is about to take shape inside Tacoma Art Museum. Tacoma-based artist David Hytone is preparing a site-specific installation that combines paintings with sculptural elements, ballasts and mechanisms—creating an exhibition that won’t simply hang politely on the walls.

Opening September 17, The Lee Shore marks a new direction for Hytone’s ongoing “tchotchke” series. The installation will play with scale and presentation while exploring subjects such as memory, isolation, nostalgia and the absurdity of modern life. It is organized by Tacoma Art Museum, curated by Ellen Ito and presented as part of TAM’s Project NW series.

Hytone’s work begins with an equally unusual process. Rather than approaching the studio with a completed idea, he creates his images from collage, paint transfers and pieces left behind by previous projects. Some works contain hundreds—or even thousands—of individually painted pieces of paper. The deliberately fragmented results can resemble memories themselves: incomplete, distorted and assembled from details that may no longer fit together perfectly.

For The Lee Shore, Hytone is expanding beyond those constructed images and into the surrounding exhibition space. The addition of three-dimensional objects and mechanical components allows the paintings to become part of something larger—and considerably harder to categorize. Hytone says the new work is more symbolic and personal, with particular attention to isolation in supposedly “connected” times and nostalgia’s ability to provide comfort while keeping people anchored to an idealized past.

Hytone received his fine-arts degree from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design after briefly studying at Osaka University of Arts in Japan. His work has been exhibited across the United States and internationally, and can be found in collections belonging to Microsoft, Facebook, Capital One, Swedish hospitals, Hilton, Sea-Tac Airport and King County. He was a finalist for the 2018 Neddy Award in painting and became a MacDowell Fellow in 2024.

The Lee Shore will remain at Tacoma Art Museum through January 3, 2027. Hytone will also give a free artist talk inside the exhibition on Saturday, October 3, from 1 to 2:30 p.m., explaining how his methods have evolved and what led him to create this strange new environment.

Learn more about the exhibition here.