Tommy Puett

Elliott Templeton Fine Arts is delighted to present a solo exhibition by the artist Mark Flood. Tommy Puett is a retired actor and former teen idol best known for his performance in the television series Life Goes On, where in 1989, he starred as Tyler Benchfield—the best friend to a teenager with Down’s Syndrome, his character dies tragically while driving drunk. With his mullet, chiseled body, and sweet face, he remained in relative obscurity even at the height of his career but maintained a teen heartthrob status, retiring at 26 years old in 1997. Mark Flood seems transfixed with Puett in the late 1990s, which led to the frequent recurrence of printed teen magazine photographs of Puett in his work. Puett’s face would sometimes appear dozens of times in a single painting, and he made guest appearances in pieces for several years. The seriality of Puett’s imagery indicates a mechanism of obsession. In Mark Flood in the 1990s, Flood (in the third-person) describes Bodies in Space (1998) as “a diagram of Mark repeatedly stopping his obsessive thoughts about Puett by making art…I can act out my sex addiction or stay home and make art.” This exhibition includes three of Flood’s Puett works: Bodies in Space (1998), Me and My Dad (1999), and the final Puett painting, The God (1999), alongside a more recent work by Flood, Soldier Boy (2017).