The title Entropvisions is in homage to my mother, the poet and art critic, Harriet Zinnes. In 1990 New Directions published a collection of her poems titled Entropisms, a word she made-up combining entropy - the tendency toward disorder - and tropism - the growth towards or away from a stimulus. Similarly, my short reviews combine entropy and tropism by suggesting growth towards a vision of art from the chaos of the art world. Through the back door, my title also pays homage to my physicist father, Irving Zinnes, whose long discussions with my mom got her thinking about entropy and tropism in the first place.
Jared Deery at Freight + Volume
2024.2.13
Jared
Deery seems to revel in trespassing art-school rules, by breaking
forms, flattening space with unorthodox scale changes, and perhaps most
interestingly, juxtaposing clashing colors and contrasting textures.
But his shenanigans add up to smart paintings that work formally and
conceptually intrigue, as compositions coalesce with integrated designs
and nuanced color shifts, and irregularities transform into personal
histories and courageous artistic experimentation. Also unexpected
and contradictory are the motifs themselves. Except for one painting
of a head – perhaps the visionary conductor of this painterly spectacle –
the mostly large paintings revolve around flowers in vases, a motif
Jared has focused on for years. But these are not actual flower
paintings. They are not even still lifes or landscapes, though the
flowers sit in some kind of place. Rather, these flowers appear as
flowers of the mind – some real, some imagined – and perhaps represent
the artist himself, or a voyeur or messenger of memory and thought. We
often look through windows, or rather the flowers look through windows,
to collaged worlds that suggest the congruence of recollection and
imagination, a Synthetic-Cubist coexistence of past, present and future,
of up, down, near and far interchanged at will, mimicking the illogical
connections and metaphors that often occur in our unconscious. For
instance, in “Memory of a Tabletop,” we see a childhood beach picnic
table depicted by faux wood paint marks, the beach represented by shells
implanted on a vase, the sea, sand and sun contained in a hat-like
shape floating above, and the intangibility of memory by a vase made
almost invisible as its thick outline and color shifts are all that
remain to show its ghost still exists. Jared seems to be having fun
exploring where and with what new painterly techniques he can embed his
imagery to create surprise and ambiguity, make us suspend belief in the
permanent and rational, wonder at what is going on, accept that all is a
transitory illusion, and realize that what we perceive as reality
perhaps is no more real than Deery’s fantastical paintings. Jared’s
exhibition at Freight + Volume Gallery remains up through Feb. 24.