Colter Jacobsen


Colter Jacobsen
Light Falls
June 1 – 30, 2007
Opening reception: Friday, June 1st, 6-9pm

The Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco, is pleased to present a solo exhibition of the work of San Francisco-based artist Colter Jacobsen, titled Light Falls. The show will include a number of new drawings and watercolors interspersed with thrift store paintings, found discarded photographs and snapshots, amongst other ephemera.

“Light Falls is a meditation on the nature of drawing, painting, photography, symmetry, seeing, not seeing and memory,” describes Jacobsen. Using water as a metaphor, Jacobsen renders his work in pairs. Culled from his collection of abandoned photographs and other printed matter, he creates sets of meticulously detailed, naturalistic drawings and watercolors one of which is drawn from a source while the other is reflected from the memory of that source. By using anonymous photographs, Jacobsen does not share in the initial memory of the photographed event but rather only in his own memory of the image. The subtle differences in his twinned drawings iterates how, as Jacobsen notes, “the dream of memory gets watered down and changes,” not only over time but merely in the course of moving from the eye to the mind.

Colter Jacobsen was born in 1975 in Ramona, California and lives and works in San Francisco.
His work has been shown in museums and galleries throughout the U.S. and Europe and was recently included in a group exhibition at White Columns in New York.

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    PURE EVIL new print
    LES FLEURS DU MAL the print made for the SOLO SHOW is now online…

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    • Thomas Allen, Knockout, 2006


    Thomas Allen, Knockout, 2006

    The Affordable Art Fair (AAF NYC) creates an exciting environment for first-time buyers and experienced collectors to purchase original contemporary art by emerging and established artists represented by galleries from around the world including the U.S., Australia, Canada, France, Mexico, and the United Kingdom. Original contemporary painting, drawings, sculpture, photography and prints are available between $100 and $10,000.

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    • Tom Meacham


    Tom Meacham
    “the greater good”

    We are pleased to announce Tom Meacham’s second solo show with Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery.

    “The title of the second solo exhibition of recent paintings and sculpture by Tom Meacham, “the greater good”, suggests both the altruistic motto of a liberal democrat and the self-convincing rhetoric of a vigilante. Meacham offers an uneasy equation of extremes through a body of work that employs grid motifs on canvas, wood sculptures of “specific object” lineage, consumer objects and mundane materials.

    “The piece that lends its name to the show is a large table constructed not as an homage to Juddian Modernism but as a deliberate misreading and displacement of those formal concerns. Laid out on its surface are dozens of knives of varying degrees of menace, from stiletto to machete. This unnerving collection, purchased in bulk through a late night home shopping network, seems designed to appeal not to the average consumer but to those who wish to amass private arsenals. What first appears to be a conventional display of weapons soon reveals a composition organized with the formal principles of a painting. The table’s base, constructed in the form of an ‘X’, reiterates crossed swords in piece that is a simple and sinister meditation on choice and freedom.

    “The trihedral motif in the larger paintings, rendered in either electrical tape or ink jet on canvas, is an appropriation of the ceiling at the Yale Art Gallery, designed by Louis Kahn in 1951. Kahn’s innovation, to expose the structure that housed the building’s inner working systems in an elegant and elemental repeating form, was enabled by the Modernist ideology of his day. In Meacham’s work, signs that historically generate ideas of strength and stability are pulled to the opposite pole. In his paintings, imperceptible flaws in measurement, proportion and scale are allowed to accumulate and accrue as the triangular module repeats, resulting in subtly disconcerting optics. The resulting images appear simultaneously relentless and unsustainable. The tape paintings in particular, either hung on or leaning against the wall, appear to be both bandage and scaffold. In Meacham’s own words, ‘the system self-destructs’ with a confrontationally scaled ‘K’, oscillating between polar readings- full (thousands) and empty (strike out). Viewed from another perspective, the symbol dissolves and the piece re-organizes as sculpture- 3 pieces of tape on a plinth.

    “Mondrian once famously stated, ‘If we cannot free ourselves, we can free our vision.’ Early in the last century, in order to pursue a neo-plasticist ideal of balance and universal repose, Mondrian abandoned the modular grid because it implied the tragedy of a rigidly ordered vision. Tom Meacham relies upon this tragedy. Every fulcrum point becomes a chance to unbalance the load.”

  • 5Be Gallery