March 31 - April 22, 2022
From Un Grito Gallery:
“You are cordially invited to view a selection of new paintings by Jason Willome – an art exhibition taking place at Un Grito Gallery in the Upstairs Studios at the Blue Star Arts Complex on Thursday, March 31, from 7 pm to 11 pm, Friday, April 1, from 7 – 11pm, and by appointment through the month of April.
Bewilderment is a selection of paintings made over the last 2 years. The title refers to a quote from Tarjei Vesaas’ The Boat in the Evening; “Bewilderment increases in the presence of mirrors.”
Artist Statement
Jason Willome works across a range of mediums, investigating the tension between the mental and the physical. At the heart of Willome’s practice is painting – a medium that he treats in a uniquely tactile way. His work rubs together competing aspects of pictorial space and surface, or illusion and sculptural form, exploring moments of paradox and metaphor in the picture where image crosses into the space of the viewer. His recent paintings depict disasters and wreckage – flooded or snow-filled landscapes with only traces of human presence – created by pours of house paint, faux painting techniques, and other surface artifacts that attenuate the representational space and frame it as fantasy – a reflection of the willful ignorance and softened reality of the current moment.
One of things I love about painting is what we ignore about painting. It is a constant negotiation of willful ignorance – we pretend we see space and volume on the flat surface of an actual volume; we don’t see the format if it is the rectangle that we are accustomed to; we look past the material marks left by a brush – along with almost every other bit of facture that has been shaped by the surface upon which it was made – to see the visage accumulated there. Painting is a practice in fiction that reflects our truth as a species of near-sighted, self-involved pretenders. May we know ourselves in time to save ourselves.
Jason Willome is an artist and Associate Professor of Instruction in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He has shown his work in group and solo exhibitions both nationally (Colorado, Hawai’i, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Texas) and internationally (Columbia, Palestine). He has also been featured in Beautiful Decay, Agave Magazine, and Stacy Dacheux’s blog, Revising Loneliness. Jason lives with his family in San Antonio, TX.”
1420 South Alamo Street
San Antonio, 78204 Texas
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1 comment
Want to see this show. Jason always surprises me with unusual inventive space.