Troy Stanley

I never planned on being an artist, but then again who does? I spent my High School years preparing for an education in engineering. I focused on math, science, and drafting and never really on form, mass, and scale. Once I began an engineering degree at Texas A&M Corpus Christi I quickly realized that I did not want to be an engineer any longer. I ended up declaring pre-Med and spent 3 ½ years of my life in biology labs memorizing anatomical models and dissecting textbooks for test questions. Pre-med never really set well with me and I changed my focus yet again. I declared a nursing major about 2 and half years into college at the University of Texas Pan-American and took a crash courses in psychology and wellness before applying to nursing school. I finally got my notification to a top school in the U.S. for nursing and instead checking the box that said "I accept this invitation" I checked the other one. I moved back to Houston and began attending the University of Houston where I took heavy course loads in studio practiced and finished a degree in sculpture. 

Very early on in my sculpture career, I realized that all those years preparing for engineering, medicine, and nursing were not all wasted. I think my work arose out of a confusion of what was an object and what was a living thing. I was not the only one that shared this confusion when at the time genes were being patented, glow in the dark rabbits were born out of test tubes, and peoples IPODS began to die rather than breakdown. I began to seriously question landscaping practices, ideas of living objects, and people's relationship to the world around them rather than context of art history. I guess I had a different perspective than most people who were attending to art school, and I was able to share a different way of seeing that was founded in my divergent education.

Since then, the highlights of my career have been having a large scale solo show at Lawndale Art Center, and also attending the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture as a student not yet attending graduate school. These two events greatly shaped the scope and the scale of my work and have kept me committed thoroughly to art and art practice. I hope this commitment will continue to offer me opportunities at home as well as abroad.