Jake Kean Mayman “Existing Structures”

Stellar Projects

This event has ended.

In his first solo presentation in New York, Existing Structures, Los Angeles-based artist JAKE KEAN MAYMAN introduces a new body of work that continues his examination of fear and anxiety as a driving force in the American psyche. Here, meticulously rendered oil paintings examine the history and motives of US involvement in Central American nations, and its effects on the current conditions of destabilized economies and the displacement of civilian populations.

Since the early 19th century, US policy has pried open the economies of Central America to the benefit of US corporations. These publicly supported policies were crafted to address America’s national security anxieties about our neighboring nation states, but in reality were used to clinch economic stability for US vested interests. Mayman’s work illuminates this dark kinship between government and business, conflict and financial gain.

Mayman depicts behind-the-scenes influencers and outspoken critics of problematic US policy like Joan Quigley and Ross Perot, alongside renderings of Central American resistance figures, commandos, and cash crops. A painting of unripe bananas appears as an innocuous still life, but delicately references how comfortably unaware most Americans are of the covert regime tampering and debt trap diplomacy that underpin even our most mundane conveniences.

In Existing Structures, Mayman suggests that the walls that divide humanity are not only built from stone. The most difficult and most enduring barriers are likely the hardest to recognize.