Jeremy Lawson
(sleeping) we’re all in the same boat alone. I don’t know what I want, what to eat, what to read, or what to hope for. Much of my desire has been offloaded to algorithmic devices returning me to a state of the preconscious bicameral mind, receiving messages from Gods that keep me generally in line as postmodern capitalist product who somehow knows too little and too much at the same time, numb to the coarseness of my cynicism, inside a body wrecked by corn.
(crawling) my practice of the last 2 years has developed outwards from a series of conceptual projects that tried to accomplish ego death. In the last of which, I contacted every Jeremy Lawson on the internet and offered them the immortality of an oil portrait if they would share some personal physical objects with me as the raw material for sculptures to be credited and renumerated to all Jeremy Lawsons equally. An installation view of all our portraits installed in an exhibition would subvert Google and make us all the number one image search at the same time. Like the Cincinnatus of Jeremy Lawsons, I’d happily retire to my farm having brought us all the only thing anyone wants, fame, but with my own dissolved into theirs, relieved, however minor it might be. But none of the hundreds I contacted wanted to merge, to transcend anonymity together, several asking that their portraits not be shown at all. Self-conscious of the project’s inherent absurdity, and the degree to which absurdity had dried up as an avenue to the sublime, I found myself bereft of the potential communion I wanted soon discovered that by letting go of commentary as art, I felt a rapturous reorientation towards the ritual of daily material practice itself, ultimately leading me to a commitment to painting, particularly abstraction, as a generator of energy, and regeneration through struggle.
(running) I paint as simply as I can. I don’t use brushes so I can touch the surface directly, or with a paper pallet, laying out oil paint to be pressed and smeared which gives me less immediate control. I contradictorily remove my “hand” through literal touch. I am surprised, excited. When I’m no longer surprised, I break the composition until it is paradoxical, balanced and not, frantic and resolved. With no direct or implied imagery, there are just moves made with paint that are responded to until they are alive. My pallet was originally based on the last works several artists made before they died, all very hot and with the implication that the lights are turning on at the end, not going out. I try to imbue a sense of the simultaneity of experiences condensed into one always dense present. Mistakes build on top of mistakes and cancel each other out as accrued knowledge as structures emerge that describe what to do next. They make themselves if I am awake. Time is slow and mostly spent staring or pacing. I do not understand when I am satisfied. It is an impossibility and then it appears, confounding, and free.