JARED SMALL
Jared Small shares the beauty of
hometown of Memphis in dreamlike paintings that collapse space and time, pushing viewers into an ethereal atmosphere. Small’s saturated paintings possess strong narrative sensibilities. He unfolds stories even with the absence of people in his ethereal, intricate portraits of flowers and houses in New Works in Oil on Plexiglass.
his
With single stems and bouquets and Southern bungalows,
Small positions the viewer between the realities of the obvious image and the histories, memories, and possibilities that lay beneath the surface. These liminal states between disappearance and reemergence speak to the puzzling ephemerality of historic homes.
Faces, flowers, and homes play off each other through color groups in this exhibition. For many years aging structures have captivated Small. As portals into layered pasts, subject is elevated to artifact, frozen in cycles of growth, resilience, and decay. As much as his flowers and homes offer a glimpse into the past, so do his portraits. Identities are unclear while personas are familiar, each painting portraying pillars of strength, beauty, and comfort.
Small’s focus on obsolescence within cycles of regeneration preserves eras, celebrations, and mournings gone by. At once hyper-real and full of depth, the subjects are encased in glossy, brilliant, glamorous surfaces we can’t penetrate. The veneer is a strong contrast to the peeling paint and sagging rooflines, spotted petals and wilting stems that further extends Small’s metaphor.
Jared Small, born in Memphis in 1980, attended Overton High School and the University of Memphis. He has participated in numerous exhibitions in Tennessee and a major solo exhibition at the Huntsville Museum of Art. His work is featured in the permanent collections of the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art and the Huntsville Museum of Art, as well as multiple private collections in Memphis and across the Southeastern U.S.
DAVID LUSK GALLERY memphis | nashville
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