BAPs

a solo show of new paintings by
Jack Featherly

curated by
Jess Nickel

Exhibition on view June 11 - July 25, 2021
Gallery hours: Friday - Sunday,12PM-5PM, or by appointment

Opening reception: Friday, June 11th from 5PM - 8PM

1607 SE 3rd Ave, 97214

Dear Viewer,

For me, painting is a magical thing. In no other way have I been able to express ideas with clarity and expansiveness yet reflect the endless stream of wonder the world provides. It’s a game of no ending. It’s measured in wins and losses, but they are natural and organic and are the same as the cycles of nature.

I’ve been painting professionally for 30 years and concepts of ‘style’ have long entranced me. Not the pursuit of a signature style, but how a style becomes embedded with cultural meanings that shift over time. Yet those meanings remain malleable if one tries to work with them as expressions, as rhetorical devices for putting forth a different meaning. The only way it works is if it’s treated with care. Not in the post-modern sense of deliberateness, but in an egoless state; where things just are.

The idea of accessibility through style and taste is a fulcrum in my work but it’s also a way of exploration. When I make paintings, the idea isn’t to find a thing that really works and make a ton of them that way. The idea is to find something highly persuasive and then see how far I can push it. My work has mostly been dropped in the Pop Art bucket which I’m fine with, but I think it’s more nuanced than that. It’s more Pop with Humanity. It can be a difficult negotiation because I rely on a double edge of irony and empathy. Sometimes I use the visual rhetoric to make a critical argument about how to see or think about what’s presented in a painting and that can dull the emotional edge. It’s these times I rely on the universe to tell me what to do. The answer will always present itself if one is open to it. That, in itself, is extremely woo-woo, but it isn’t wrong.

At some point in early 2019 I decided that my abstract game wasn’t up to snuff. I made the decision to make the abstraction do the work in the paintings. Previously, I had been engaging in political imagery that questioned labels and the idea of who gets to make what. It wasn’t a winnable game and that was the point I wanted to make, but it still wasn’t working. So, I stopped trying. I realized I needed to be willing to be stupid and make ugly things and just let them talk. Have I described an IDGAF game? Possibly. We have to take ourselves to places of freedom to attain it and sometimes those places are ridiculous to everyone but ourselves.

Like most people, I was blindsided by the realities of Covid-19. Suddenly there was no distracting routine possible in the everyday world. With constantly shifting emotional states exacerbated by endless provocations and protests, equilibrium was in short supply. Yet, I found things. I let myself experience emotions in real time and let those things into my paintings in ways I wasn’t quite aware of. They were impulses and I allowed them to have their way.