Jason Haam is pleased to present a group exhibition featuring a selection of works by: Ahmed Alsoudani, Oliver Arms, Peter Buggenhout, Marie Cloquet, Jung Jae Ho, Linn Meyers, Jin Meyerson, Anthony Pearson, Florian Schmidt, Mircea Suciu. Opening exactly a year after the gallery’s inaugural exhibition with Oliver Arms, the exhibition will be on view from January 25th, 2019 through March 12th, 2019.
Since its inaugural exhibition, Jason Haam has maintained a strong program, devoted to its artists and has attempted to fulfill its role as an international platform by presenting contemporary artworks to its audience. This group exhibition showcases a selection of works representing the practice of each artist.
As a witness to the violence of the first Gulf War, Baghdad-born artist Ahmed Alsoudani addresses the physical consequences of war and psychological remnants of violence within his works. In Flower (2018), suggestive figures of severed arteries, dismembered limbs, and tumorous organs are disguised beneath silhouettes of floral imagery. Layering multiple narratives and abstracting fragmented forms within a single image, Alsoudani develops a pictorial language characterized by personal experience that embodies the universality of human suffering.
Romanian artist Mircea Suciu explores the psychological effects of socio-political events through combining different materials with the monoprint technique. Study for the Iron Curtain (2014) portrays a figurative and literal representation of the Iron Curtain, covering a sheet of cloth over the object. Revealing absence and concealing presence, Suciu uses physical and psychological tension to create an unsettling sense of fear.
Through his portrayal of the urban landscape, Jung Jae Ho presents traces of modernization and cultural development found within the physical environment and collective conscious. In Friend (2018), Jung portrays a scene in which he witnesses during his morning commute—an object of death. Using charcoal and acrylic paint on Hanji, a type of Korean paper, Jung creates a delicate, evocative landscape that seems to depict a scene of accumulated narratives and time.
Creating highly condensed compositions of distorted and manipulated images, Jin Meyerson portrays the transmission of information in the digital age. From a series of the artists’ personal iPhone images, Untitled (Paradise) (2018), depicts a figure wrapped in bedsheets. The oversaturation of color creates an illusion of movement—the way an image flickers across a digital screen.
Manipulating photographs of landscapes by manually deconstructing and reconstructing images, Belgian artist Marie Cloquet reveals the ‘in-between’ spaces of place and time. In Obstacles XI (2018), a shadow of cloth is veiled over the constructed landscape—a manifestation of process within composition. In this way, Cloquet portrays a visual image of physical process and creates a physical form of abstract space.
As sequences of dots and lines appear within close proximity, Linn Meyers creates visual forms of movement on a two-dimensional plane. In Untitled (2018), the square within the center of the composition functions as a principle order to which each mark responds—the creation of structure and form within the work. The progression of the image evolves from an organic process as a reconciliation between intent and intuition while revealing traces of movement from the body through space.
Through the repetitive act of building up and wearing down paint, L.A.-based artist Oliver Arms creates abstract works that unveil content through form. Native Son (2014-2015) takes its title from the novel by American author Richard Wright of the same name. The antithetical nature of Arms’ process demonstrates a visual exchange between structure and form—between marbled layers of paint and expressive brushstrokes—evoking the emotions and experiences of one man’s unavailing attempt to respond to the inevitable systematic construct of society.
Austrian artist Florian Schmidt explores the physical act of painting through the relationship between materiality and visual images. In Untitled (Deviation) 16 (2018), pictorial composition is constructed of geometric shapes made from cardboard panels; these panels are repurposed material—remnants from previous works. By using elements of deconstructed form, process manifests as a physical form within the work and is re-contextualized as structure within composition, as materiality creates illusions of depth and pictorial image onto the surface of the work.
Manipulating material through organic processes, Anthony Pearson’s body of work incorporates elements of painting and sculpture. Pearson’s Etched Plaster series emphasize the physicality of material and the fluidity of form. After pouring hydrocal, a type of gypsum cement, into hand-made frames, the artist creates a system of mark-makings, revealing detailed reliefs on the surface. These reliefs cast shadows as light is reflected onto the surface, continuously transforming the work as an image.
Peter Buggenhout uses abject materials such as blood, hair, and cow stomach to create works without symbolism. His sculptures are not representations of objects, but rather analogies for the functions of our world. In Weke delen #2 (2000)—the literal translation being “soft tissue” in Dutch—Buggenhout decontextualizes material to recreate form. Although its suggestive title allows a sense of visual familiarity, its material composition negates any sense of contextual reference.
