Bill Lowe Gallery is pleased to present the newest exhibition of works by Atlanta artist Jimmy O’Neal in About Now: An Introspective. In this quasi-retrospective exhibition, new paintings, drawings, sculptures and installation, alongside remastered earlier works, create an immersive platform for a central theme from throughout the artist's three-decade career: the exposure of the thin membranes that exist between our experiences of reality. O'Neal articulates this most effectively through the application of his self-engineered, lens-based mark making.
Over the years, O’Neal’s scientific mindset has led him to innovate in both the materials and processes that guide his practice. For instance, the mirrored acrylic painting technique he created during the late 1990s speaks to the legacy of other contemporary artists, like Michelangelo Pistolleto, who used the mirror as a strategy for inviting the viewer’s participation. However, in O’Neal’s case, it is within the mirrored lens paint itself that he makes each one of us an active component of the his intricate compositions constructed with expressive, highly textured, and overlapping abstract traces. In another grouping of works, the artist has incorporated technological tools into his creative process through his “brain-machine” constructed to “paint” the artist’s brain waves and eye motion resulting from external stimuli.
Using his lens-based painting technique, O’Neal’s paintings reflect the world around us masterfully changed by the painter, and perhaps truer to feeling. O’Neal presents the evocative nature of the frequencies and unseen visual poetry that are ever-present, thus documenting an individuated experience of the constant flow of consciousness. To do so, he captures "real-time" signifiers of this reality and provides us with glimpses into the universal Gnosis - our inner knowing of that which we cannot consciously articulate. Steeped in multi-dimensional theory, O’Neal’s abstract large format gestural paintings envelop the viewer in a distorted, parallel reality - through the looking glass.
Redefining the material possibilities of medium, mechanics, and time, is at the heart of the insatiable curiosity that drives O’Neal’s practice. The result is paintings that transform our sensory perceptions into something that can only be captured by the experience in a singular moment. This is the magic – born out of contrasts: space/time, here/there, then/now.
O’Neal has exhibited in galleries and museums including The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, and the Jacksonville Museum of Modern Art. He received his BFA in Illustration and his MFA in painting from Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). O’Neal has created many major public art installations including one of the largest commissioned works at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Golden Goal, in Atlanta. Additionally, his paintings and public works are in collection at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, the Cobb Energy Building in Atlanta, Georgia; the Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS); and the Hanesbrands Theatre, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
