Wheedling a Gallery in London

June 23, 2009

F_____ Gallery
London, UK
I am a Seattle-based artist with a 2002 M.F.A. in painting from the University of Washington, and am exploring the possibility of exhibitions of my work in London, and would like information on your submission policies. I sell paintings primarily through the Seattle Art Museum Gallery and privately, and I teach at the college level in the Seattle area.

Modernist and gestural in appearance but rendered using objectivist techniques, the paintings fracture the image field into my competing and complementary aesthetic reactions to time, memory, and cognition of the moment: an ancient artist-to-model gaze, unapologetic, despairing and reverent, processing the expansive emotional and intellectual debris of a man simply seeing a woman.

I labor to be descriptive and evocative regardless of ideology, either political or critical. It often takes months to understand a small aspect of passing hour. In an over-dense visual culture which breeds emotional and intellectual indifference to mere images, I build on the human gaze, the consciousness guiding the hand and learning of the world by this act.

My paintings argue for the dynamic of vision, illusion, and intellectual curiosity explored within the act of painting. This idea of a still image as a description of the passage of time was famously used in Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, which itself was based in early motion capture photography. In my work, the direction is reversed; where the futurists embraced technology, metal, speed, this work stuffs the 20th century into observational painting traditions; the notion of time employed is organic and human, photography rejected, the marks gestural and muscular but pushed back into pictorial space, the synthesis of mood, process and image elevated.

Art is a distillation of this passionate drive to both make and understand, more ambitious, putting out tendrils of sensing into the most delicate and fleeting of concepts and experience.

Your initial thoughts or advice would be most welcome; my website is at JamieBollenbach.com.

Thanks for your consideration.

Jamie Bollenbach