Jack Featherly “Fax Generation”
Mesler/Feuer
This event has ended.
Mesler/Feuer presents Fax Generation, an exhibition of new work by Jack Featherly.
In the paintings, Featherly references themes, ideas and genres of art history from minimalism and op art to appropriation and portraiture. Found imagery is abstracted by solid blocks of color or encoded into characters to present brightly hued, multi-themed paintings.
The ASCII paintings use an archaic visual language as a universal filter for redistributing meaning. The ASCII code on the paintings functions as literal op art and is hand-painted, which incorporates the likelihood of human error with various types of background. The ASCII paintings are titled Unpattern to reference the way our eyes sort information and look for pattern. In this case, the pattern is a variable series of keystrokes that represent dark & light, but the distribution is forever uneven in its repetition since it is applied to a representation of an object.
Featherly draws and paints images onto a ground and then overpaints them, often allowing an ink component to bleed up through and integrate with the subsequent layers. The top layer is a deliberately brushed abstraction that has been dragged and scraped, creating different visual qualities of paint. Combined with the bleed, what comes forward and what recedes is an evolving issue.
Certain images are conjoined with a split or disruptive abstraction that mimics a cartoon frame and plays with the idea of the border. Found images are removed from their original context or presented without accompanying text, causing imagery to maintain its aesthetic power while functioning as a non-sequitur, as blocks of color obstruct concrete imagery.
Jack Featherly (b. 1966, Rolla, MO) completed a BFA at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, OR. Featherly’s solo exhibitions include Team Gallery and Jose Freire(New York), Rena Bransten (San Francisco) and Upfor (Portland, OR). He has shown throughout the United States and in France, Germany, South Korea and Japan in two-artist and group exhibitions.
Media
Schedule
from June 25, 2015 to July 31, 2015
Opening Reception on 2015-06-25 from 18:00 to 20:00