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Email PageCrossbar Hotel
January 27, 2007- February 24, 2007
Reception: January 27, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Jim Wright
Rare
521 W 26th StJim Wright: In his third one-person exhibition at RARE, entitled Crossbar Hotel, this Brooklyn-based artist presents the continued development of his own unique painting process, which utilizes a collage-like technique, while expanding his repertoire to include sculpture. Through drawings, paintings and sculpture, Wright creates narratives of an alternate American universe that serves as a metaphor for cycles of development of civilization, the life/death of language, and similarities between art and music- making.
The drawings, paintings and sculptures in Jim Wright’s one-person exhibition at RARE, entitled Crossbar Hotel, tell imaginative American narratives through a unique style that utilizes paint. Stories involving romantic notions of prisoners creating their own self-sustaining existences in a fantasy world deep in Appalachia become metaphors for recurring cycles of American life. The works depict uprisings that lead to further struggles for power and ultimately to fleeting stability and decadence. The characters’ demise is inescapable, even as the cycle of civilization brings to them an abundance of wealth with which to acquire the means for their own defense.
Much like musicians who mine our rich cultural history and traditions to make something new, Wright combines folk art-like imagery and a love of bluegrass music to inspire his mechanically inventive technique. Hundreds of individually templated, pre-fabricated brushstrokes are collaged together to mimic the way musical notes compose songs. Expression, (dis)harmony, rhythm and timing are all imparted through color and the often-overlapping, disordered placement of these small paint shards. The symbiotic relationship of subject matter and process comes to life through collaboration and improvisation. Wright follows the oral tradition and relationship among musicians who hand down a musical language from generation to generation. His narratives can be de-coded through our shared visual language and a uniquely American point of view.
Wright’s invented “folklore” functions much like Greil Marcus’s Old, Weird America in which archetypal figures are derived from a vision of the early years of the republic when life was a much more arduous struggle. The artist superimposes contemporary experience upon his tales to form a fantasy world where the collective unconscious of our shared past enhances the realities of the present. The excavation of antiquated and nearly lost imagery, stories, and language inspires Wright to imagine a world that once existed but is now largely confined to the dustbin of history. It seems appropriate then that the artist should name his works with titles as contrived and outdated as their subjects.
In Scofflaws’ Widdendrem (2007), convicts who have escaped from prison go back to the wilderness to create a self-sustaining, natural existence for themselves with the ultimate aim to free their brothers who were left behind during the initial jailbreak. They eventually impose dominance over Nature to harness its power for their own gain – they set fires on a mountainside to melt snowcaps to produce water that is captured by aqueducts and manipulated into an open pit to cool the “Devil Rock” (an imaginary form of natural TNT) that is being excavated. As the cycle continues, a new society is established as the one-time prison escapees civilize themselves. Ergophobic Partouse (2007) depicts the creation of towns, the building of idols, and ornately attired citizens who pass their time in decadent pursuits: music, painting, and theater. Eventually, this egalitarian society is dissolved as one faction pushes for supremacy, causing internal strife and violence that nods to Imperialism, culture wars, and a society constantly at odds with itself.
Wright, who grew up in Virginia and Washington, D.C., currently divides his time between his home and studio in Brooklyn and the Shenandoah. He made his European solo debut in 2006 at Galerie Schuster/Scheuermann in Berlin. This is his third solo show at RARE.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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