Current Exhibition
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ENTER/EXIT | JARED CLARK & JAKE WATLING February 20 - March 29, 2009 Artist Reception | Friday, February 20, 2009, 6-8PM Swarm Gallery presents ENTER/EXIT, an exhibition featuring new works by Berkeley-based artist Jake Watling
and New York-based artist Jared Clark. In the project space, Olympia-based artist Joe Penrod uses blue painter shape shadows to
portray a monumental sculpture in Germany. Using installation, sculpture, paintings and works on paper,
the three artists join in a visual dialogue from varying perspectives. When you walk into a gallery, what will happen in the time
before you walk out? What will you see and connect to? What is intimated, what is said, what screams out to you? What lies
in the chasm between the contradictory ideas of life and death? Is there a linear path, or is it cyclical, transforming into new
life, new meaning, over and over? Where do we exit our worlds and enter someone else's? Where do the boundaries lie? Jake Watling's urban primitive paintings investigate themes of life and death, generational cycles, and rebirth from
both his personal perspective as well as through a broader context. In composing his pieces, Watling refers to childhood memories,
personal experiences, cities and streetscapes, his community, and a diversity of beliefs and rituals. An icon in African and
Polynesian indigenous cultures repeats throughout Watling's work to serve as a symbol of death, or tranformation to the next
life. Jakes paintings, works on paper and used tire installation address death, rites of passage and mind reform. His work often
integrates religious themes within an urban setting, and humorously plays with ideas of passive transformations, false selves
and moral virtues.
New York-based artist Jared Clark visits Oakland for his second exhibition at Swarm. Clark acts in a playful and reverent
manner to broaden the dialogue of painting and expand the scope of its location. As a self-described "interventionist," Clark seeks
to transform both the materials that he works with, and the dialogue of painting, through participation rather then reformation. In
practice this leads Jared into the territory of ready-mades, installation, and playful systems that operate on multiple levels. His
"Paintings" often consist of found objects arranged in dialogue with the classic residence of painting: The wall, the grid, and the support. SELECTED WORKS PROJECT SPACE | Joe Penrod City explorer Joe Penrod, uses ordinary
blue painters tape to document every day icons of the urban landscape - traffic cones, stop signs, benches, garbage cans and ladders, to name a few.
For this installation in Swarm's project space, he plans to build a column of traffic cones in reference to Constantin Brancusi's "Endless Column." The
original sculpture was created as a tribute to young Romanians who died in World War I fighting Germany. His tape shadows mimic shadows cast by the
sun, yet the bright blue contrasts to what our eyes expect to see, creating a beautiful and surreal illusion. Joe Penrod, Orange and Blue (2009), Installation in Project Space |