Jeremy Willis- Attempt

For Immediate Release:

Jeremy Willis: Attempt

Exhibition runs from October 4-October 29, 2011

Artist Reception - Friday October 21, 6-9pm

House Gallery

29 East 400 South

Salt Lake City, UT 84111

www.housegalleryslc.com

801-322-1027

House Gallery is pleased to present Attempt, an exhibition of new paintings by New York-based artist Jeremy Willis. The exhibition features a series of large-scale, oil-on-canvas images with fleshy, frenetic abstract gestures interspersed with fragments of legible human figures. These never become whole. And that’s the point: Willis wants to know how one person can make herself legible to others in this strange, oversaturated world in which “personal identity” has become a marketable product. The artist’s reception will run from 6-9 PM on October 21, 2011.

Willis’ work puts the personal and public on a collision course, and what you see in the finished paintings is the mayhem the collision has caused. Colors, shapes and patterns are jammed together, caught in a hurricane of confusion. Every form and detail seems to be fighting to become dimensional and human but failing again and again. Willis has referred to his paintings as hybrid, human Rorschach blots, readable if you fall back on your subconscious, but always hovering between pure expressiveness and representation. The show title, Attempt, refers to each piece’s dramatic attempt to make the illegible legible.

There’s a cruelty evident in Willis’ paintings that is intentional and uncomfortably compelling. Because human beings have an innate desire to communicate, depriving them of decipherable identities, and thus the means of communication, is brutal. But abstraction has always toyed with such brutality. Look at Willem de Kooning’s work and you’ll see that it never fully submits to expressionistic gestures. Always, it hovers on the edge of figuration. The same can be said of neo-expressionists like Anselm Kiefer, and it’s these figures, not newer apocalyptic painters like Tomory Dodge and Dana Schutz, with whom Willis seems most resonant, though with one exception. When figures do appear, they’re cartoonish, over-dramatized pop culture ideas of human bodies. This suggests his push to make human beings legible as individuals will never pan out, no matter how many insistent, tumultuous attempts he makes.

Willis received his B.F.A. from University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1999 and his M.F.A. from Hunter College in 2008. He has had solo exhibitions at DuMois Gallery in New Orleans and AS220 in Providence, Rhode Island. His work has also appeared in exhibitions at Priska C. Juschka Fine Art and Spattered Columns in New York, the Brooklyn Lyceum, among other venues across the U.S. and Canada. Attempt, the artist’s first solo exhibition at House Gallery, continues through October 29, 2011.