Jason Meadows: Light Year/Clear Spot
February 26 – March 26, 2005
Opening reception: Saturday, February 26, 6-8pm
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is pleased to present ‘Light Year/Clear Spot,’ the gallery’s third solo exhibition of new work by Jason Meadows. With its title reference to an epic album by Captain Beefheart, the show features an improvisational play with pure abstraction that is more structural, lyrical, and in line with musical compositions and choreography, than the character driven figuration of previous work.
Painterly patterns in two dimensions turn into masterful illustrations of three-dimensional space, exploring simultaneity in abstraction and representation. Exploiting readily available, even modular, material (wood, paint, steel, plexiglass), Meadows brings instant narratives to life as classical exercises in form. Color is used in ways both painterly, and planar, with some works featuring complex visual surfaces, while others use color to define solid space. Though the palette remains relatively simple, consisting of primary and secondary colors, the found nature of the material contributes an element of painterliness that breaks up the simple geometry into a microcosmic universe of variation. In this sense, no work can be absorbed or perceived in full from any one perspective.
In the front gallery space, ‘Black Mech Strata’ greets visitors like a heavy metal monster machine. The most sophisticated work narrative-wise, a mesh screen sparkles and obscures, as a choppy wooden construction crouches behind. In the main space, ‘Martin’ splays its wide legs, comprised of sprayed blue steel tubing and Plexi-discs, and engages in a conversation on angular asymmetry with ‘Blind Slide’, a red and silver configuration of modified bicycle racks. Pulling these linear works together, ‘Click-Clack’, with its wooden paddles and mirror-Plexiglas elements becomes a reflective lens and gravitational counterpoint. In the second gallery space, a similar dialogue ensues between two works – the architectural ‘Proscenium’ dominates the space, yet reflects and activates the wall-leaning canvas and wood piece, ‘Understudy.’
Meadows incorporates a rough edged, hand-made production quality into his practice, often in contrast to the distinctly Modern forms and structures that comprise the sculptural work. Making references to pop iconography, ancient mythology and art history, Meadows resolves these layers of subjects and meaning as skillfully as he juxtaposes patterns on surfaces with layers of materials. A series of collages made from magazine advertisements, featuring the celebrity heir Paris Hilton, serves as the two dimensional nexus of these concerns. In the series, representations of a pop-mythological figure in found imagery is cut-up, copied, repeated and manipulated, filtering our conception of the familiar through a lens of spatial complexity.
Jason Meadows lives and works in Los Angeles. Meadows is currently featured in Culturecounter, at Passerby, New York. Recent group shows featuring include The Thought that Counts, Sister Gallery, Los Angeles (this show was curated by Meadows, and each work was a collaboration between Meadows and another artist); I, Assassin, Wallspace Gallery, New York Now is the Time, Dorsky Gallery, New York; Off theWall, Gallery 400, University of Illinois at Chicago, August 21-September 22, 2001; Brown, The Approach, London, July 5 – August ; Locating Drawing, Lawing Gallery, Houston, TX; Mise en Scene, CCAC, San Francisco, CA.
