Windows into the hidden worlds
Allentown artist uses found objects to express intangible
BY JENNIFER KOHLHEPP Staff Writer

PHOTOS BY JEFF GRANIT staff Allentown's Tom Queenan in his home studio where he creates framed and boxed scenes out of manipulated photographs and found objects such as dolls that he takes apart and rearranges.

Allentown's Tom Queenan has discovered a way to capture the elusive.

By collecting and carefully juxtaposing found objects in small frames and boxes, Queenan, a retired English teacher, has found the visual means to express the poetic thoughts that manifest through memories, fantasies and dreams.

"If it is expressing something, it's not intentionally," Queenan said of his body of work. "It's like the art of the Dada movement, putting stuff together and letting its energy come out if it wants to come out."

Creating windows into hidden worlds started as a hobby for Queenan, who retired from a teaching career at South Brunswick High School in 1988. Upon retirement, he filled his need to work with words at the Allentown Public Library while finding the means to express himself artistically, which he had wanted to do since childhood, in secondhand stores and flea markets.

"I always liked art," Queenan said. "I can't draw. I can't sculpt. I can't paint. So, what's left?"

Queenan turned his ventures to local thrift stores like Red, White, and Blue in Trenton and rummage sales like the New Egypt Village and Auction into more pointed hunts. He collected items that intrigued his eye and used them in a magic trick one of his favorite artists developed.

"I really liked the work of Joseph Cornell, an American artist who designed stuff in boxes, and I started to imitate him," Queenan said.

Queenan has since turned thousands of everyday objects into mysterious treasures. Over the past 15 years, he has created hundreds of tiny dreamscapes that now inhabit the walls of his studio and the Allentown home he shares with his partner, Andrew Rudin.

Besides Rudin and a few close friends, no one has peeked into Queenan's hidden talent and gallery. He's never sold, only given bits of his body of work away. And he's never shown his work, because the right opportunity just hasn't presented itself yet.

PHOTOS BY JEFF GRANIT staff Left: A painted doll and a torn-out image of a woman come together in one of Tom Queenan's creations. Right: Tom Queenan, of Allentown, talks about finding odds and ends at thrift stores, flea markets and dollar stores for his artwork.

This artist never had professional training and considers himself first and foremost a collector. His love for scouring secondhand and dollar stores is apparent by the collections in his studio. A box of Ken dolls sits next to a pile of faux black crows near a bag of plastic skulls and heaps of glass Christmas ornaments. Some of these items may be torn apart and put together with parts of other items, manipulated photos, and paint to hint at an abstract idea greater than the sum of all of the parts.

For instance, Queenan took a vintage G.I. Joe doll, which has the same physical scale of a Barbie doll, and painted its face the color of charcoal. He took gauze and soaked it in plaster of Paris, which allowed him to gather it around the figure to look like a tattered robe. The end result looks like the ghost of a soldier gone through war.

Examples of other pieces include dismembered dolls' appendages painted green and emerging from a box reminiscent of a child's wagon. Queenan also enjoys combining human and animal parts, as in his chicken with an undersized man head, and in his man's head on a dog's body. His more whimsical works include the image of a woman in motion by Eadweard Muybridge tilted to look as if she is lifting off and disappearing into an ominous gray sky, and another that shows oyster shells from Sandy Hook set on an opera stage.

"A lot of them have some little oddity that's not apparent when you first glance at them," Queenan said.

One of the oyster shells on stage is actually the face of a doll painted to look like another shell. Another one of Queenan's little surprises is that he actually used road kill to create a box. When the sun shines through a scene set up on the living room windowsill, it illuminates the remains of a squashed frog Queenan pulled off the street.

PHOTOS BY JEFF GRANIT staff Top: Tom Queenan among the hundreds of imaginary worlds he has framed and boxed over the years. Bottom: Road kill became the subject of one of Tom Queenan's creations. Here, the sunlight shines through a window to illuminate the squashed body of a frog that Queenan pulled off the street.

Each scene, like a dream, has many layers and the ability to pull a spectator in to search for meaning. Queenan's hidden worlds are places where schoolboys reach the cigar box-door to the unknown, where artist Robert Mapplethorpe is allowed to spill off the page, where women tumble through the clouds as naked and as comfortable as they were in the womb, and where deterioration itself is a romantic art form.

The words now come out of the wordsmith's eyes.

"This is very satisfying," Queenan said. "I know that ever since I started doing this, I don't go to museums with the same eye as I did before. I enjoy things more and I can see things better."