Jaya Howey
29 Jun - 28 Jul 2006
JAYA HOWEY
June 29th to July 28th 2006
Opening reception Thursday, June 29th, 6-8
(upstairs)
In the upstairs gallery Jaya Howey will exhibit a group of oil paintings on canvas. Howey has developed a unique visual language that combines personal icons with geometric elements and an application of paint that moves from thickly built to translucently washy. The spaces created in his paintings never allow you to settle in, always pushing and pulling you out of their supposed perspectives and planes making the seemingly simple compositions quite difficult to grasp. In the acid green, The Better Trap (2005) Howey renders an elaborate pull trap that when looked at more closely proves itself to be useless. He has in a sense painted a nihilistic sculpture, a metaphor for a multitude of schemes that seem so easy at first until you are able to step back and find your perspective.
Two smaller paintings take Sir Author Conan Doyle's character Sherlock Holmes as their subject. The Final Problems, (2006) whose title is taken from a Sherlock Holmes trivia book of the same name, is a text painting which seems to radically diverge from Trap, but the manner in which the letters are painted echo some of its triangulated forms. An Ambivalent Approach to Problem Solving (2006) is executed in a faux pointillist style. When viewed at close range the image is muddled and unclear but when observed with some distance the profiles of Holmes and Watson become apparent. This stepping back could be read as analogous to Sherlock Holmes' aptitude for seeing things in perspective while others were fumbling over details. Howey uses the Watson/Holmes duo as a metaphor for his own practice, where opposing approaches are employed in order to solve problems. With the works exhibited here, Howey seems to be playing with modes of making. Where in his paintings he never allows the viewer a foothold, in his practice he doesn't allow himself a comfortable method of working that always delivers an easy product.
Jaya Howey's first solo show was at Taxter & Spengemann in April 2004. He received his MFA from Columbia University this spring and earned his BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1999. Several of his works on paper are concurrently on view in the exhibition I Was a Sunbeam , at David Krut Projects in Chelsea.
June 29th to July 28th 2006
Opening reception Thursday, June 29th, 6-8
(upstairs)
In the upstairs gallery Jaya Howey will exhibit a group of oil paintings on canvas. Howey has developed a unique visual language that combines personal icons with geometric elements and an application of paint that moves from thickly built to translucently washy. The spaces created in his paintings never allow you to settle in, always pushing and pulling you out of their supposed perspectives and planes making the seemingly simple compositions quite difficult to grasp. In the acid green, The Better Trap (2005) Howey renders an elaborate pull trap that when looked at more closely proves itself to be useless. He has in a sense painted a nihilistic sculpture, a metaphor for a multitude of schemes that seem so easy at first until you are able to step back and find your perspective.
Two smaller paintings take Sir Author Conan Doyle's character Sherlock Holmes as their subject. The Final Problems, (2006) whose title is taken from a Sherlock Holmes trivia book of the same name, is a text painting which seems to radically diverge from Trap, but the manner in which the letters are painted echo some of its triangulated forms. An Ambivalent Approach to Problem Solving (2006) is executed in a faux pointillist style. When viewed at close range the image is muddled and unclear but when observed with some distance the profiles of Holmes and Watson become apparent. This stepping back could be read as analogous to Sherlock Holmes' aptitude for seeing things in perspective while others were fumbling over details. Howey uses the Watson/Holmes duo as a metaphor for his own practice, where opposing approaches are employed in order to solve problems. With the works exhibited here, Howey seems to be playing with modes of making. Where in his paintings he never allows the viewer a foothold, in his practice he doesn't allow himself a comfortable method of working that always delivers an easy product.
Jaya Howey's first solo show was at Taxter & Spengemann in April 2004. He received his MFA from Columbia University this spring and earned his BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1999. Several of his works on paper are concurrently on view in the exhibition I Was a Sunbeam , at David Krut Projects in Chelsea.