Press Release: Fold. Color. Limn.
December 3, 2011Meridian Gallery is proud to present the first major survey of the work of Bay Area artist Prajakti Jayavant, curated by John Zarobell, former curator at SFMOMA.
“Jayavant’s work is a complex constellation of artistic ideas rendered immediate in the flesh. Her painted works on paper are folded and cut, torn and trimmed. Approaching this work requires an open mind because it is not illustrative but provocative. The paintings refer to so many objects we might have seen before and they evoke thoughts and sensations but finally stand alone. They play by their own rules, creating a universe through overlapping forms and complementary colors. These objects enter our space and take up our minds. Most of the works on view have been produced in the past two years but a few were made earlier and provide context on the artist’s development. In addition, this exhibition marks the release of the limited edition, hand-made artist’s book STORY (2001/2011), which supplements the mute expressiveness of the paintings with voice and spins strands of language into an interior narrative.”
- John Zarobell
Drawing for Djerassi
April 14, 2010
Each resident at Djerassi is asked to leave an artwork after their stay.
Here’s mine, shown still stuck on the studio wall. I foraged through the wood burning stove that I was tending for some materials.
Materials: Kindling debris, soot, used matchsticks, and gesso on paper.
Dimensions: 11 in. x 8.5 in.
Date: 2010
Detail of drawing for Djerassi
April 14, 2010
No need for charcoal pencils when soot is present and plentiful.
Essay by Mark Bartlett: Excerpt from Abstraction as the Material Imagination of a Vitalist Machine
April 12, 2010So the question then becomes: what other forms for referentiality might abstraction offer beyond linguistic meaning?
To what, for example, do the exquisite works by the San Francisco based artist Prajakti Jayavant refer? Are they in fact caught in the infinite loop of their own self-referentiality? Made of cut, stitched, folded, creased, and stapled paper, her monochromatic painting- sculptures must certainly be said to signify something other than merely themselves. This need not mean, however, that we must play the associative game of discovering signs in them, allusions to some recognizable, realistic object ‘out there’ in the ‘real world.’
They are certainly self-contained, free of categorical, optical reference to say, the lapis lazuli ornaments worn by Egyptian nobles, or to the jade buttons of Confucian China. They are not building blocks of Victorian era brown stone houses or black pillows cushioning the heads of the dead entombed in eternal sleep.
But they do suggest stories, reflections on suffering, malady, beauty, and desire. They suggest inchoate, affective forces at work in the world that stir us, emotionally, to life. They are works in the sense of labor, a type of materialized thought that is bracketed between representation and interpretation, between which they resonate with feelings that mold, fold, and sculpt our responses to them.
They act on us, shape us, makes us what we literally are, what we concretely become when we experience them. They are records of events, of actions, and to experience them means that we must recreate them, by identifying with them, through interjecting their emotional tonalities. They offer us the chance to become empathic.
They are then, signs of ourselves, not of themselves. We are their reference; they signify us when we discover ourselves outside of the usual frames of reference to, and conventions of, optical realism. But they are every bit as real. They open up a literal dimension between the signifier and signified, in which we experience a discrepancy between optical recognition and the recognition of the emotional events that makes us who and what we are.
Abstract Connections conference, Tate Modern, London, UK, 2010 © Copyright Mark Bartlett 2010
Interview with Peter Selz (Berkeley, CA, 2010)
January 5, 2010
Selz: When did you know that you were going to become an artist?
Jayavant: In an academic context, the decision to become an artist didn’t happen until my very last years of undergraduate school at the Ohio State University. I had been planning on being an English/ Creative Writing major but found myself taking art classes whenever I could; eventually acquiring my Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Painting/ Drawing.
S: What types of art classes?
J: Studio and art history classes with an emphasis on theory.
S: What type of work were you making?
J: In 1996/97, I was building large scale, (six by eight feet), canvases and was strictly an abstract expressionist oil painter. I was experimenting. When it was time to find my focus, I scaled down the work drastically and even removed paint from my vocabulary. I had been taking a printmaking class and as a result my prints became more painterly and my paintings became
more constructed. I continued building my own stretchers with sturdy canvas and made tiny collages on paper. Instead of paint I implemented different materials such as string, fabric, wax, pins, photocopies of such materials, etc. I was trying to renegotiate and redefine what painting was to me.
Page in The Last Book
January 18, 2009
A quick installation pic of my image in ’The Last Book,’ a project by the incredible Luis Camnitzer.
Location: The National Library, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Print Edition for Jancar Jones Gallery
October 10, 2008
Prajakti Jayavant
Untitled (JJG #3), 2008
offset lithograph on paper
18 x 15 inches
edition of 100, signed/numbered
Press Release: Jancar Jones
October 10, 2008
JANCAR JONES GALLERY 965 MISSION SUITE 120 SF CA 94103
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Prajakti Jayavant October 10 – November 8, 2008 Opening, Friday, October 10th, 6-9pm
The Jancar Jones Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibit by San Francisco-based artist, Prajakti Jayavant. The exhibit will include Jayavant’s characteristically sculptural paintings on paper and will coincide with the release of a print, in an edition of 100. Starting with single sheets of paper, Jayavant layers paint and medium on top of crimps and cuts, repeating, applying pressure, and then repeating to create beautifully dynamic three-dimensional forms. At times mimicking bent metal, she implies solidity through her meticulous and time consuming process, all the while maintaining a strong connection to the physicality of drawing and an indebtedness to the minimalist canon. As she notes, “These materials, tools, and actions constitute my vocabulary/language of drawing. My work is in dialogue with Lucio Fontana’s sculptural interpretation of the drawn mark, Ellsworth Kelly’s exploration of space and shape, Robert Ryman’s use of painting to convey objecthood, Richard Tuttle’s interplay of dimensions, and Agnes Martin’s engagement with beauty and sensation. Though I situate this body of work in the arena of drawing, my interest involves the questioning of a work’s function as both an object and as a drawing.” For her installation, Jayavant will work with the geography of the gallery space to create an intimate setting for her work that is conducive yet somewhat atypical of her work’s usual gallery presentation. Prajakti Jayavant was born in Cleveland, Ohio and received her MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 2001. Her work has most recently been included in exhibitions at Meridian Gallery in San Francisco and The Drawing Center in New York.
For more information please contact Eric Renehan Jones or Ava Jancar at info@jancarjones.com or visit www.jancarjones.com. Gallery hours: Thursday – Saturday, noon – 6pm and by appointment.
Opening reception with fellow artists Dean Smith and J.John Priola.
