JASON MEADOWS: MICROCARVING: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

May 9 - June 22, 2002
Installation Views
Press release

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is pleased to present ‘Microcarving’, the gallery’s second solo exhibition of new work by Jason Meadows.

 

Jason Meadows illustrates three-dimensional space in sculpture that explores the potential for simultaneity in abstraction and representation. Exploiting readily available, even modular, material (wood, paint, aluminum, plexiglass), Meadows brings generic characters and instant narratives to life as classical exercises in form. Then, just as they are introduced and their roles are defined as elemental parts of greater composite narrative, they are obscured beneath a veil intersecting geometries. 

 

Beyond the formal exploration of space, Meadows uses the seven works that comprise the exhibition to address issues of scale, perspective and focus. Creating a virtual landscape of figurative elements, Meadows provokes a shift of focus between detail and overall composition. Color is used in a way that is more painterly than planar – not simply delineating space, but providing a complex visual surface. Rather than using planes, shapes and color in a pure, almost minimal way, there is a more intense exploration of surface detail. Though the palette remains relatively simple, consisting of primary and secondary colors, there is an element of painterliness that breaks up the simple geometry into a microcosmic universe of variation. In one work, writings in black magic marker and even a polaroid photograph are used as surface compositional elements.

In this sense, no work can be absorbed or perceived in full from any one perspective.