NEW YORK, NY.- Derek Eller Gallery will present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Jameson Green entitled Crutches, Crosses, Caskets / Caskets, Crosses, Crutches. For his fifth solo show at the gallery, Green evolves both techincally and conceptually, fine tuning his style and content to present his most singular voice to date.
Crutches, Crosses, Caskets / Caskets, Crosses, Crutches references a representation of the Black community which centers around a cyclical metaphor for change: Crutches, a culture wounded by its own hand or circumstance but wounded perhaps even fatally; Crosses, it will be prayed for, as a pastor prays for the soul at a funeral; Caskets into the soil you shall return, but like anything created there will be an end. By then flippng the title to Caskets, Crosses, Crutches, the metaphor becomes about rebirth: from the ground we arise; through religion we find faith, and through strength we persevere.
The largest painting in the show, entitled Colored TV, touches on this metaphor with it’s sterotyped depictions of Black masculinity and violence. At the same time, this large panoramic work contains a realistically rendered vignette of an infant clutching his smiling mother, a passage which Green suggests is the painting’s “bedrock”. It is the solidity of home and of true love that perseveres despite the chaos of the outside world.
For Green, building and strengthening foundations, both personally and through his practice has been central to this body of work. Several paintings speak to this: in one, a figure hunches to the ground, simultaneously planting seeds and watering them with a hose from his backpack. A pair of paintings depict the primeval Adam and Eve. Eve is seen in profile, seated beneath a tree, flanked on one side by a dark, ominous creature and on the other by a dove. Adam, rendered frontally and in a limited range of tones–gray, white, black, red–is an exquisite lesson in drawing, a return to the most fundamental way of making pictures. Adam appears in another painting, this time a portrait (a self portrait?), chin serenely resting on laced fingers. While Green has always found inspiration in art history’s masters, the familiar references to composition and iconography have been replaced by something more personal, more vulnerable even, allowing him the freedom to plot his own course.
Jameson Green (b. 1992, lives and works in upstate New York) received a BFA from School of Visual Arts in 2014 and an MFA from Hunter College in 2019. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Almine Rech, Paris and London and Sorry We're Closed, Brussels. Green's work has been featured in recent group shows including On Ugliness, Medieval and Contemporary, Skarstedt Gallery, London, UK; Fire Figure Fantasy: Selections from ICA Miami's Collection at ICA Miami; When You See Me: Visibility in Contemporary Art/History, Dallas Museum of Art; and The Echo of Picasso, Museo Picasso Málaga, Málaga, Spain. His paintings are included in the permanent collections of Dallas Museum of Art; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and ICA Miami.
