WWW.JACKBALAS.COM
TOUR &
ARTIST STATEMENT:
SEEKING QUESTIONS TO LIFE'S
BIG ANSWERS
For years my work has encompassed painting and photography, with
occasional works in sculpture, writing, and other media mixed
in for variety. Across these media there has been an interest
in offering links between the visual and the verbal, between conceptual
and material, object and site, the viewer and history, between
fact and fiction, abstraction and representation. Broad territory,
granted, but I have long been interested in building bridges between
disparate ideas and iconographies.
FIRST, THE LATEST:
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The most recent, current
paintings and drawings put aside seamless spaces in favor of
multiple and disjunctive ones. At the same time there is a continued
interest in mapmaking and the idea of the document. But there
has also been a switch from diaristic encounters with subject
matter to a new attention to some timeless issues such as:
truth, beauty, religion, faith,
time, the infinite, what we learn and what we know.
It may seem questionable
indeed to even concern myself with such unanswerables, but in
an era when political and spiritual leaders assert that they
in fact have the answers for us all, I think that art has the
capacity to imagine otherwise. I continue
to number pieces sequentially and sometimes stamp them with the
dates I worked on them -- perhaps in an attempt to keep track
of time, but also, perhaps, to consider that experience is cumulative
and overlapping, embellished over the course of days and enriched
by simultaneous, if discordant, ideas.
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CURRENT
PAINTINGS
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STUDIO
MEN
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Thus, all of the works become, in a sense,
documents -- documents (or maps) annotated with words or images
that, when compiled into a book or exhibition or globe, suggest
reading from left to right, right to left, upside-down or inside-out.
My goal is to
make images that are memorable not only via their stylistic variety,
in a sense creating flags that signal a kind of symbolic territory,
but also to offer you a kind of map where it is your responsibility
to build bridges across the middleground between images and ideas.
The beauty, hopefully, of interpreting such a construct then,
is that while I might think I may have layed out a map in front
of you, I cannot guess where you might choose to go, nor even
which route you might take.
THE BACK AND FORTH OF PAINTING,
PHOTO, WRITING AND SERENDIPITY
I first began to paint landscape
while in high school in Chicago, but in college wound up studying
sculpture for both my undergraduate and graduate degrees. During
those college years I discovered photography not only as a break
from "the usual," but also as a way to remain an artist
during those summers when I indulged my love of travel. When I
moved to Los Angeles after graduation, however, I returned to
painting as an inexpensive and highly portable medium for someone
trying to live on the cheap in a Pasadena studio. My subject matter
quickly returned to landscape after about a year there, as I landed
a job as a solo cross-country truck driver for an art-shipping
company and proceeded to spend weeks upon weeks driving and looking
at nothing but the landscape. But while driving, the time and
energy constraints of the job did not allow me to paint at night
in motels, so I turned to photography again during the day --
pulling over for a minute or two to take some photos, and I started
to write as well in restaurants or out walking at night, at first
descriptions about the places I was driving through. Gradually
I began to throw in bits of fiction and eventually layered these
texts onto the paintings, offering verbal tangents to go off on
but which emanate intuitively from the images.
1990's Painting
Archive |
The
Plains of San Augustin, New Mexico, 1986 |
When I began in the mid-80's to fly around
the country as part of the job, the flying intensified my interest
in the landscape since I could now gaze out the window and within
a few hours watch landscape go by that it had taken me days to
drive, and compare it to the road atlas opened on my lap. Landscape
as document, landscape as territory, landscape as diary. By the
time the job ended I had begun to compile a manuscript about it
called MILEMARKER;
based on its strength I wound up teaching writing at the University
of Colorado in Boulder-- at first freshman composition, and later
art writing. During this time (the mid-1990's) the paintings had
grown to nearly seven-foot-square iconic presentations of symbols
(flags, planes, furniture, animals) on canvases that fold or roll
up like maps, sometimes having been sewn together like flags from
smaller pieces of canvas. For a 2-year period around 2000, I devoted
more time to exploring abstraction, appropriation and techniques
in works structured again like maps. But in 2002 I returned to
painting imagery based on day-to-day experience and travel photography,
starting to include stories once more and other information, much
like the annotation to be found on the backs of photographs or
at the edges of an atlas.
Pour
Paintings, 2000
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PAINTINGS
2002
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PAINTINGS
2003-2004 |
PHOTO
CANVAS HYBRIDS
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Layered over all of this since 1995 was
a new series of photographs called STUDIO
MEN . Started on an intuitive whim, these single-frame B&W
images deploy men in my studio to interact with signs, tools and
other props. They are stand-alone images and are on-going, but
when I began in 2001
to paste them onto canvas and draw and paint on them, the new
Photo
Canvases
were more like maps than anything else to date. At times the
photos seem to touch
on ideas of self-image in an age of media saturation, as well
as on age, ephemerality, territory and perception. But as I gradually
started to include myself in many of the images, I realized too
that they are just as much about my own ageing vis a vis a veneer
of perfection and beauty, about my own transition from a world
I used to think of as accessible to one in which other conjurings
both physical and mental take place. These figurative concerns
have entered the latest paintings now, brought about in part by
osmosis, and heightened by a year's
worth of teaching painting and figure drawing as a visiting artist
at the University of Arizona in Tucson, in 2003-04.
NOTES ON THE OTHER MEDIA
I do delve into other media from time to
time, but more when opportunities present themselves these days,
rather than out of habit as in the past. A sample:
My interest in history as content began
with three public art proposals
for the City of Dallas in 1994, 95 and 98 for which I was asked
to write poems based on neighborhood histories. Then, in 1996
while a visiting artist at Florida State University, I did a series
of paintings of Spanish Moss hanging from the trees called "SPANISH
MOSS: AN EFFIGY OF THE SOUTH," which
were paired with photos of hands holding books open to historic
images of lynching victims. While the paintings could have been
considered a tourist's response to north Florida, the photographs
became a way to delve into the racism of the Chicago neighborhood
in which I grew up.
History on a more personal level then found
its way into some of my infrequent sculptures. A 1999 piece THE OBERDICK
CHAISE, incorporates
a silkscreened story in which I muse about the history of the
house I live in and the people who owned it before me, while the
materials themselves speak of history too, since they are clapboards
saved from a kitchen remodeling project. Other works revolve around
the idea of the house too, from furniture-like chairs made of
drywall scraps or fenceposts adorned with the names of American
Indian tribes, to an installation called MY
MOUNT RUSHMORE in which a long text about leaving my own history
somewhere in the house for whomever owns it next is written on
the walls of a bedroom I was remodeling, the day my drywall contractor
was supposed to show up to start covering everything with new
sheetrock.
A public installation project was BATHERS:
AN INSTALLATION, a site-specific piece at the Boulder (Colo.)
Public Library -- a building built over a creek down which inner-tubers
come floating with the spring run-off, and where I wrapped the
entrance gallery with a continuously-sewn banner of about 100
bath towels, on each of which were sewn images of bathers from
both art history and my STUDIO MEN series. Working on a completely
different project at about the same time, I had a stack of 11"x14"
photo enlargements in the studio that I happened to pick up and
flip through as if it were a book. This chance occurrence led
to a 13-minute video, FLIPPING:
AN EPIPHANY, that is a good example of some of the shorter,
more tangential ad hoc PROJECTS
in which I have engaged over the years:
 Bathers: An Installation |
Name Matters |
from
FLIPPING: AN EPIPHANY
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Another example, "NAME
MATTERS," is a conceptually-based series of works
on paper that considers the segmentation or specialization to
be found in today's art world. The series takes ads from art magazines
and, via collage or other media, inserts my own name into lists
or other monolithic presentations of "big" names --
at once offering fictions that could become reality upon reproduction
or publication, while questioning the surface styles that go along
with name recognition. The subsequent series "ACTS OF
APOSTLE" is more fanciful, taking the pages of an old
Janson's art history text and musing (with a variety of media)
about what and how we learn in all those darkened slide-projection
classrooms.
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