January 20 - February 14, 2015 FAB Gallery
In his recent work, University of Alberta assistant professor of painting Jesse Thomas considers images as objects and pictures as ideas. How do technical production, subject matter, and narrative structure generate meaning in ways that are unique to painting?
“The relationship between visual abstraction and representation of the world around us is fluid,” says Thomas. “A work of art is understood to possess its own forms and structures, distinct from reality, but apprehended through its relation to our understanding of the world.”
Songs from the Labyrinth seeks to reconcile narrative elements taken from three different spheres: the distant, complex, and constructed realms of social, cultural, and political history; the equally complex and constructed, but closer to home, autobiography of memory, nostalgia, and desire; and the empirical data of the physical world that surrounds the artist and is directly experienced through the senses.
The show presents traces of the truly awesome in nature—the gesture and rhythm of a churning eddy in the Athabasca River or the curve and flow of smoke pouring off a burning stick pulled from a campfire.
“Within these pictures it is the gesture and flow of many small marks that together constitute the whole – forms and spaces and the light and shadow that renders them visible,” says Thomas.
About Jesse Thomas
Jesse Thomas is Assistant Professor in Painting at the University of Alberta. Paintings from his most recent series, The Cerulean Brigade, were the subject of solo exhibitions at Robert Bills Contemporary in Chicago and the Eleanor Harwood Gallery in San Francisco. In 2011 and 2012, his paintings were featured at NEXT in Chicago and AQUA in Miami, and work from this series was also selected to appear in New American Paintings in 2010 and 2011. Jesse has taught Painting, Drawing, and 2D Design at Washington University in St Louis since 2003. In the fall semester of 2007 he taught painting and drawing in Cortona, Italy for the University of Georgia. He also taught painting classes in Florence, Italy for WUSTL in the summer sessions of 2005 and 2007.
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