Jason Jaworski X Juxtapoz X Thinking Of You October 03 2015, 4 Comments

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AMAZING coverage of my solo show Thinking Of You on Juxtapoz!

From their online feature:
Featuring over 100 prints and numerous sculptural works, Thinking Of You is one of the largest and most intricate exhibitions the artist Jason Jaworski has created. Spreading the work out across two large scale installations and a video piece projected onto glass, the selection emphasizes the layers of meaning in the artist’s work, specifically his career-long mediation and incorporation of time, memory, chance and distance. Moving beyond the pages of the artist books for which he is renowned, Jaworski incorporates seemingly disparate bodies of work into two powerful, deeply connected installations, evoking the lush and the barren while simultaneously exploring and threading themes into a multitude of provocative questions related to a deeply entrenched longing which is common throughout all his work.

Jaworski’s photographic images within the first installation, Some Things I Left Behind, intertwine a complex range of projects and sources, including the performance based photography of his 1000 MILES project created in collaboration with MOCA, the process based images from his project SEA which had him developing his negatives with ash from a bomb site in Mexico City, the site-specific wandering from ROME ALONE where he followed employees of several bootleg factories in Taiwan and had his work printed at them, to the recent documentary theater of LABYRINTH where the artist followed a gang of little people through different slums in the Philippines where they created set pieces and scenes to act out for the camera. Threaded through the installation are a sprawling textwork and numerous artifacts from the artist’s archive that ties each image together through broad strokes of both textual and physical memory.

With the second more sculptural installation, Things I Found Along The Way, the artist includes an evocative mix of materials, such as various forms of found imagery, paint, chalk, dehydrated fern and bonsai leaves, ash, clay, earth, terra cotta, grated rubber, chia seeds, and a specially formulated compound of concrete the artist created himself. Incorporating each element as a sedimentary layer, the artist baked the materials onto canvas, afterward sanding them down and carving out different blocks, whilst shaking the canvas vigorously to allow different elements to fall on their own in an abstraction of subtraction. In addition to the two installations, the artist is exhibiting a video work comprised of shot and found footage set to a sound piece created by combining ambient music with manipulated field recordings the artist created while on location at Fukushima, Japan in March of 2011. Combined together, the two installations, the video work and the exhibited artist books culminate into a deft new vision and voice in contemporary art and photography. 

The exhibition is on view until November 24th at The Mana Contemporary Museum in the Bookdummypress Gallery, check it out while it's still there!

Address:
Mana Fine Arts
888 Newark Avenue Jersey City, NJ 07306