-
JACK BALAS
(1955-)For years my work has encompassed painting and photography, with occasional works in sculpture, writing, and other media mixed in for variety. When I worked with landscape imagery and the constructed environment in painting years ago I liked to talk about formal concerns: painting as map or diary or arena linking visual and verbal, conceptual and material, fact and fiction, abstraction and representation; not to mention a blend of styles and a viewer building bridges between disparate ideas and iconographies. While all this remains true, with the paintings today I would say that, given how many images we are all bombarded with every day via the media, I am simply interested in making memorable ones.
-
-
-
The works are annotated with words or images that, when compiled into a book or exhibition or globe, suggest reading from left to right, right to left, upside-down or inside-out. My goal is to make images that are memorable not only via their stylistic variety, in a sense creating flags that signal a kind of symbolic territory, but also to offer you a kind of map where it is your responsibility to build bridges across the middleground between images and ideas. The beauty, hopefully, of interpreting such a construct, then, is that while I might think I may have layed out a map in front of you, I cannot guess where you might choose to go, or even which route you might take.
JACK BALAS
Current viewing_room