news
all images on this site are copyright 2009 jason shawn alexander
May 8th, 2010
Solo exhibition
Corey Helford Gallery
Los Angeles/Culver City, CA
October 10th, 2009
“Insomnious”
Solo exhibition
101/ E x h i b i t
101 NE 40th Street
Miami, Florida 33137
October 17th
“The Human Eclectic”
Group exhibition
Merry Karnowsky Gallery
170 S. La. Brea Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90036
PRESS
ART NEWS december 2009
“Insomious” was a fitting title for this show of expressionistic new paintings and drawings that Los Angeles-based comic-book illustrator Jason Shawn Alexander says emerged in semiconscious visions just before or after sleep. In these works, as in dreams and nightmares, emotions are more vivid than environs, backgrounds are hazy, contexts shift, actions are cryptic and fraught with menace and unspoken anxieties.
Enigmatic scenes suggest ominous narratives. A naked woman squats in the background as a partly clothed man mutates into a bird in Own Worst Enemy (2009).
Paired figures appear detached from their surroundings and from each other, even when they seem to be alternate images of one subject. In Parallel (2009), a woman circles around herself. Study Members of the Resurrection (2009), featuring two bedridden men in inverse positions, could be a film storyboard for a split-screen sequence. Many of the faces are captured simultaneously from two perspectives, like double-exposure photographs, with blurred lines indicating the path of movement. Recalling Bacon’s portraits, the figures seem to cry out.
Alexander limns flayed flesh and twisted limbs with sinuous stroked and mottled shading. His impassioned application of oil paints underscores the barely contained violence of the visions, lingering like intimations of half-remembered dreams.
-Margery Gordon
