In advance of my next project which is slated for
#losangeles I have been thinking about where it all began for me. I moved up to
#nyc in the summer of
#1995 after getting my MFA
@pafacademy and like most young artist was at the stage where i was filled with excessive amounts of overconfidence and insecurity. I stumbled into radical digital space via scanned images of
#americanfootball #h2hummer and a handful of
#lowrider paintings. Like so many of us who were born outside the
#usa or are the children of immigrants, we were formed and defined by American popular culture, and our need to assimilate and carve out a critical space of our very own. Which connected us all to each other and to the contemporary art moment.
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My earliest pieces were often misunderstood (even by myself), these were not solely celebratory, nor critical, like my own presence, they were mixed blessings. Intersections of korean adoption, midwest america, guided by a Jewish American father and a Swedish American mother and grandparents. I spent countless hours staring at images immersed in fields of distortion. At the very core of what I felt I needed to do to advance painting, my own practice and personal presence was to take what the screen gave me. Purposefully subverting ideas of authenticity, authorship and originality, basically all of the things which contemporary painting is judged and valued by.
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I also thought of my work as pretty funny, a short-ethnic guy was making heroically scaled paintings drawn from mainstream media and pushing the images to recognition’s most distant edge. Which brings me back to the beginning, in advance of a
#hollywood premier. . .
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BAD ACTOR, 2024
Oil on canvas
162 x 130cm
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#jinmeyerson #notesfromtheinterior