Objects, Language, Puddles, & Painting: An Interview
There is a rock on the exterior ledge of my window. The rock is not simply a pile of material reducible to its smallest parts. It remains this rock as it trades atoms with its surroundings and undergoes changes in appearance. The rock also cannot be defined exclusively by its function. It is this rock whether I choose to look at it or cast it into a river. An object is a presence predominantly filled with something absent. An essential keystone always fails to appear. There is something hidden or withdrawn from us. What refuses to surface might be considered an object’s inwardness. Legibility is the degree of ease with which experiences, signs, and symbols convey meaning based on their appearance. The capacity for something to communicate hinges on its visibility, though a visible object is not necessarily a legible one.
I give extended attention to materials and situations that are concealed by their commonness and acute specificity. Plastic bags against the curb are like this, or when the wind blows and one leaf on a branch flickers faster than the others. The particular and the minor become uncanny when we look closely at them. They occupy a specific field of experience: one that is barely there, fragile, and unable to be translated beyond the human scale of close, fixed vision. In both looking and making, I am searching for ways to disclose and describe this ambiguous space. My days are centered upon a process of observation, description, collection, and contraction. I notice something somewhere. I gather materials from that particular location. I try to describe this process to myself through written passages and diagrams. The object starts here, as text. Making the object is a way to witness the translation of experience from language into something wordless. The resulting object is a document of loss.
Belief is foundational. I am constantly wondering about the boundaries of things. I wonder what the painted surface can and cannot hold. I have been defining my practice broadly as a mechanism for generating a productive delusion, where a stick can also be a spirit. The activity and space of painting is an arrow that points elsewhere, but somehow always encircles itself.
Jamey Hart (b.1992, Erie, PA) is an artist whose practice focuses on casting everyday experiences into the shadow of discrete objects. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from Cleveland Institute of Art in 2014 and his Masters in Fine Arts in Painting from the University of Houston in 2021. His work has been included in publications such as New American Paintings, Reciprocal Magazine, ArtMaze Magazine, and Lula Japan. Selected solo exhibitions include “Mere” at Gray Contemporary in Houston, TX, “And” at Automat Gallery in Philadelphia, PA, and “Slow Pace Time” at Front Gallery in Houston, TX. His practice has earned institutional support and recognition from Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Houston Arts Alliance, The Hopper Prize, Vermont Studio Center, and The Massachusetts Cultural Council. He currently lives and works in Des Moines, IA where he is Assistant Professor of Studio Art at Drake University.