Jeff Bailey Gallery is please to present Jered Sprecher, Digging in the Dirt. The exhibition title implies an elemental action, in which the artist bypasses conventional methods of image making for rudimentary communicative gestures.
In large and small oil paintings, geometric forms and crystalline structures are featured prominently. These shapes are standardized and repeated across the surface of each work, creating a play of order and disarray. Simple forms are grouped and rearranged resulting in complex layers of patterning.
Sprecher compares his paintings to a kind of image-based handwriting. =He samples from a vast and seemingly disparate vocabulary of visual motifs, ranging from computer graphics to childlike renderings. Other source materials include children’s learning aids (i.e. Froebel blocks), commercial advertising, kaleidoscopes, architectural systems and gemstones.
Nature of Analogy depicts a prism like grid over a kaleidoscopic rush of yellow, lavender, teal and pink. In each corner, flat black or grey rectangles serve as brackets or anchors. Both painting surface and image seem caught in a state of flux.
In Seize, four hard-edged geometric shapes in industrial yellow sit atop a ground of earth tones and vertical black and blue lines. The graphic yellow forms recall the authority of traffic signs or road marking, while the muted underpainting suggests ephemerality. Forced stylistic relationships form a poetic slippage between the component parts.
This is Jered Sprecher’s second solo exhibition at the gallery.He has had solo exhibitions throughout the United States and his work has been included in group exhibitions at The Drawing Center, New York; Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; Cheekwood Museum of Art, Nashville; Des Moines Art Center; Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids and Arthouse, Austin. In 2003, Sprecher participated in the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Space Program. He was an artist in residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Ireland in 2007. He is a 2009 recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. Sprecher lives and works in Knoxville, where he is an Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee.