User:IntegersInSpace

I am the subject of the draft article Draft:TJ Norris. I am a multidisciplinary artist and I am committed to following Wikipedia's policies on neutral point of view, verifiability, and conflict of interest. I intend to contribute primarily through the Articles for Creation process and by providing factual, sourced updates to ensure accuracy. I welcome edits and corrections from uninvolved editors and encourage anyone to improve the article independently. All edits and rewrites to the draft article have been composed by me personally. I do not submit AI-generated text to Wikipedia.

As a multidisciplinary artist based in Fort Worth, Texas, some of my interests include contemporary art, experimental sound art, the histories of strong women and marginalized communities, and immersive audiovisual performance. I'm interested in contributing to articles related to these areas and wherever curiosity leads — including to the Dallas–Fort Worth area, where I relocated in 2014 to be closer to my now-husband, whom I had been courting since 2012; we married in 2017.

I grew up in and around Boston — a city with a long, deep history that, despite its smaller footprint, gave me a useful foundation for navigating larger cities later. I spent serious time in the collections of the Harvard Art Museums, the MIT List Visual Arts Center, and the always-surprising ICA. But the place I kept returning to was the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum — particularly to spend time with the beguiling Titian, Rape of Europa, a painting I was constantly doing a double-take in front of, alongside works by Manet and Rembrandt. Cambridge was home territory — from Kendall Square to Harvard Square, haunting record shops for unusual recordings, zines and whatever else crossed my path. Those years included concerts that still feel vivid: Laurie Anderson at the Opera House in 1984, The Cramps and Nina Hagen at the Channel, Liza Minnelli at Boston Symphony Hall in 1992, numerous shows at the Paradise Rock Club (including Pizzicato 5, Saint Etienne, and Echo & the Bunnymen), and many nights at Spit and Metro.

These days I work in the studio daily, currently focused on two ongoing series: Cathartic Dissonance (photography) and Elemental Studies (a touring 4-channel film installation). Both are documented at tjnorrisart.com.

My diet has leaned plant-based since 1984 — long before it was fashionable. When I lived in the Pacific Northwest I spent a lot of time hiking through mountains and desolate, beautiful terrain — good country for owls, hawks, lizards, and the kind of quiet that's hard to find elsewhere. I'll never forget my first impressions of the mighty Crater Lake. These days, away from those mountainscapes, I try to stay healthy with yoga and aerobic exercise. I'm also a devoted dog lover, with a particular fondness for mastiff breeds. My beloved English Bullmastiff, Sarge, passed in 2024 at around age 13, and I've since welcomed a new rescue — Madea, a Boerboel — who keeps me very active with daily dog walking.

A lifelong cinema obsessive, I'm particularly drawn to the work of Derek Jarman, Peter Greenaway, John Waters, Maya Deren, and the Brothers Quay, as well as Péter Lichter, a Hungarian filmmaker and a newer find for me. The Criterion Collection and Janus Films catalogs are a reliable rabbit hole. My reading tends toward monographs on artists who slipped through the cracks of art history — Jonathan Miller's Nowhere in Particular (1999), a quiet collection of photographs of torn and weathered urban surfaces, is the kind of book I return to, alongside work on fascinating artists like Marlow Moss, something of a doppelganger for Mondrian. I make a habit of getting to the museums in the Dallas–Fort Worth area at least once a season and am a particular fan of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

As someone drawn to creative minds who can pare down a composition to its essence, I follow immersive audiovisual work closely — particularly the output of Sankai Juku, Dumb Type, and the German label Raster Media, and the sound of dub techno (example: Basic Channel).

Travel tends toward the less obvious. A recent highlight was Cuenca, a UNESCO World Heritage cliff city, where I visited the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español — housed in one of the city's famous hanging houses — and spent time with works by Antoni Tàpies, an artist whose influence on my own practice runs deep. Other cities I keep returning to in memory: Barcelona, for the view of the entire city from the Bunkers del Carmel, and Montreal, for the Kondiaronk Belvedere on Mount Royal.