JASON MEADOWS: LIGHT YEAR / CLEAR SPOT
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.’