532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel presents "Voices and Visions: Four Contemporary Artists", a new exhibit of previously unseen work by four vibrant new artists.
"Voices and Visions" features paintings and sculptures from Jackson Hill, Yongjae Kim, Stuart Lantry, and Jon MacGregor. What unites their disparate visual styles and media is a keen sense of how personal identity intersects with the act of expression. In each of these works the perceptional qualities of "vision" merge with the inner narrative of "voice" in a graceful pas de deux of creativity and form, line and plane, essence and act.
"Voices and Visions" runs from November 9, 2023, to January 20, 2024.
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Jackson Hill creates paintings and imagery that convey an unsettling power, murky gothic psychoscapes full of menace and suggestive of multiple hidden meanings. “Translation” features two figures mysteriously conjoined against a Gauguin-esque background of figures and motifs; “Wilderness” centers a crouching figure with a haunted, unreadable expression kneeling in a phantasmagoric forest. The expressionist facture and brilliant handling of light and darkness lend Hill’s compositions a mesmerizing, oneiric force all their own.
Despite their bravura dexterity, Yongjae Kim’s paintings project an aura of unknowableness, of epistemological uncertainty. Their hyper-accurate attack displays both stunning technical command and a playful sense of multiple realities in collision. The ethereal beauty of paintings like “Classon Ave” and the Hopper-esque “Awakening” conceals a tough-minded skepticism of radical empiricist bent — as with all photorealistic painting, the basic acts of perception and vision are called into question by the aggressive blurring of medium.
Stuart Lantry’s work has its root in the soil of conceptual art and of relational aesthetics, wherein actions, connections, relations, and movement take primacy over the static image. In Lantry’s practice this takes the form of assemblages that engineer playful interactions that skirt the boundary of human and machine. “False Start,” for example, is a jerry-rigged kinetic sculpture that shows a mechanical arm turning the pages of a sketchbook, suggesting a sardonic re-framing of the act of reading. In Lantry’s hands even the most quotidian of acts are endowed with wry metaphysical echo, witty and philosophical.
The paintings in Jon MacGregor’s “Paradise Troubled” series have an angular, off-center affect that accumulates great mystery through viewing. Lushly sculptured oil paintings handled with Renaissance-level skill portray such ordinary objects as shirts, door latches, washbasins, and curtains; two of them center painstakingly depicted broken eggs. Dust Settles on Fragile Things executes a witty detournement of memento mori-cum-still life conventions. The framing of the subjects is often disjointed or askew; when combined with the precise, glowing facture, the result is mysterious and mesmerizing: paradise troubled, indeed.
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Jackson Hill is a figurative painter known for creating psychologically charged scenes that explore the tenuous interface between the material world and the ever-changing abstraction of internal life. His work is grounded in memory, often blending elements from his rural and suburban childhood in Indiana with his later urban life. Although Hill primarily works in oils, he has recently begun exploring the interplay between site-specific found materials such as litter or animal bones. Hill received his MFA from the New York Academy of Art, where he was awarded the Kaws and David Schafer Artists of Excellence scholarships. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Yongjae Kim is a Brooklyn-based artist originally from South Korea. His mostly representational paintings depict ordinary spaces and urban places, evoking a sense of solitude, loneliness, desolation and melancholy. Kim completed a BFA at Seoul National University in Seoul in 2011 and an MFA at Pratt Instute in Brooklyn in 2014. He is a recipient of NYSCA/NYFA fellowship for 2021, the Best Color Work Award from Korea Society of Color Studies at the 2014 International Invitational Exhibit of Korea, and the First Place Award at international art exhibion “City” at Art Room gallery in 2018.
Stuart Lantry makes installations, sculptures, videos, and drawings that offer absurd meditations on how we create meaning from the routines of our everyday life. Raised in Los Angeles, Lantry received his MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2016 and his BA magna cum laude with high honors in studio art from Dartmouth College in 2012. His work has been shown across the United States with exhibitions in New York City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Providence, and New Hampshire. He currently lives and works in Philadelphia.
Jon MacGregor is a New York City-based artist born and raised in Georgia. His paintings investigate the linkage between the sublime and the melancholy born out of southern gothic legacies. The paintings align themselves with art historical references and self-aware parables of life. MacGregor borrows from traditional painting techniques and fuses them with his love of contemporary imagery. He is the former recipient of the Gerry Bosch Art Scholarship Endowment and the Edward Shorter Art Scholarship Endowment, among others.
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