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PRESS RELEASE
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Opens: Friday, June 10, 7–9 p.m.
Location: 487 Driggs Ave, between N. 9 and N. 10
Dates: June 10–July 10, 2005
Gallery Hours: Thurs–Mon, 12–6pm
Contact: Don@JackthePelicanPresents.com, 646-644-6756
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John Jacobsmeyer imparts a pathetic, world-weary dignity to pop superheroes and freaks of the realm, like [The Attack of the] Fifty Foot Woman Nancy Archer. (—She is the eight-foot-square megadon centerpiece of this assortment of Monster Lonely paintings.) Jacobsmeyer uses masterful and studied oil technique, reminiscent at times of the Cinquecento mannerists Agnolo Bronzino, Giulio Romano and Il Parmigianino, to turn action-figure plastic and news flash and B-flim celluloid into palpable humanized flesh. But, with characteristic discombobulation, he refigures the expansive, courtly gestures of the old masters into American Sign Language, to fall on deaf eyes with pleas of help for a world gone sick.
Further twists in Jacobsmeyer’s manifestly allegorical paintings hinge on anamorphic representations of Good and Evil buried into the surround. In Steve Austen Does Not See the Enemies of Democracy, vigilant anti-communists of the 1950s hide in the stripes of the American flag. In his painting of Ham, first monkey in space (lost forever in the abyss), one can see from the chimp’s perspective the schoolboy-ish poster of Jane Goodall that decorates the capsule’s otherwise Spartan décor.
The grand old world tradition of painting in which Jacobsmeyer works had a brief dessicated revival in the 1930s with high kitsch Social Realism. Vintage WWII (golden age) comics soon transmuted the idealized bodies of Socialist workers into pop superheroes for little boys. For the next several decades, comic books and pulp science fiction books and films continued to mine Cold War anxieties and ambivalence towards science with celebrations of radicalized supranatural anatomy—with hundreds of variants of nuclearized or alienated flesh. Jacobsmeyer restores the complex awkwardness of human depth to these conventional and one-dimensional figures of righteous justice. Presented up close and intimate, they are by turns vulnerable, self-conscious, frightened and ashamed. And, they are likeable.
Additionally presented is Jacobsmeyer’s in-progress book of beastly wood engravings extrapolated from James Dickey’s poem, “The Sheep Child.” A New Hampshire native, and Yale MFA, Jacobsmeyer has lived in New York for six years. Since 1999, he has been a Graduate Instructor at New York Academy of Art. He is the winner of numerous awards, including a Pollock Krasner and a Fulbright. This is his first one person gallery show in the city, and his most ambitious to date.
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View additional images
Gallery 2
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