Face it. You don't have any patience. Your attention-deficit attempts at knitting or bedazzling your significant others' Statue of Liberty Hotpants are pretty half-assed. But you're PROUD of your artwork, you protest. I'm proud of your artwork too, but it takes a pretty dedicated artist to hold a candle to Tennessee artist Jason Briggs. I first met Jason when he was going to grad school at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. While he was there, he really started indulging his obsessions with surface decoration. Jason is a mad scientist type who isn't afraid to put his clay kinks on display. His magnum opus in graduate school was a "sex" machine--an animatronic coin-operated sculpture complete with male and female-esque parts, some strategically placed fun fur, and a viscous, spurting goo that lived in a resevoir at the base of the piece.
Jason taught me a lot about approaching artwork. Throughout his life as a student, his instructors tried to get him to "loosen up"--that is, make work with spontaneous marks...showing the process of the clay a la Peter Voulkos. If you've ever watched Jason work, you'd know that the above is terrible advice. Jason's instructors in grad school pushed him to spend even more time building up his surfaces. Jason has been out of school for 7 or 8 years now, charting his own eccentric course--and (scarily) molding young minds at Belmont University in Nashville. He lives with his wife and dog at the edge of a rural town in Tennessee, focusing on his art.
You can imagine how excited I was when Jason joined the 21st century and launched his website earlier this week. His full range of work is on display, divided into "Evolution", "Recent", and "Current". Jason showed his work over the summer at the Tennessee Arts Commission in Nashville in a show entitled "glimpse". He doesn't favor long titles, preferring to allow his viewers to absorb his pieces at their own pace. That is not to say that information about the work is scarce--Jason is a born educator, and provides us with a detailed glimpse into his process, going as far as including brief animated clips, as well as a note about attaching his own eyebrow hairs into the "pores" that are constructed in his pieces. His works rest on pedestals that accentuate the forms of the piece--from latex pillows and slings to stainless steel. I can't think of an artist who is more obsessed with tactility and the the attraction and repulstion that we associate with the human body.
You should spend some quality time with Jason's new website--clicking on the images in the gallery will give you larger-than-life images that will allow you to see the details writ large. There is positively no substitute for experiencing the work in person, though. I challenge not to grimace, wince, and recoil when seeing the work--similarly, it's incredibly hard to restrain yourself from reaching in and touching them. I'll keep you posted about his next show so that you can see for yourself.
