Jacob Fenton: Usufruct
3201 La Cienega Ave, Los Angeles, Ca 90016
Saturday, September 28 at 6:00 PM 9:00 PM
Ends Oct 26, 2024
Carlye Packer is pleased to present Usufruct, the first major solo exhibition of Los Angeles-based painter Jacob Fenton. The exhibition opens Saturday, September 28th, 6-9PM and will be on view through October 26th, at 3201 La Cienega Ave, Los Angeles, Ca 90016. In Usufruct, Fenton’s work explores memory and the constructed self in the accelerating age of instantaneous media. Utilizing imagery primarily from World War II, Fenton removes primary source imagery from its original context to critique post-truth reality, the fracturing of identity, and the birth of hyper-individuality (especially for those born and raised on the internet). Atmospheric and figural elements are blurred nearly beyond the point of visibility or distinction, which gives viewers very little allusion to place, period, or time for the paintings. Each image is selected as they possess reflexive qualities that force questions of the ideological relationship between the self and the environment. The work posits a political revisionist history by posing new and old roles of American mythos against one another, allowing personal opinion and ideas to be re-interrogated outside the typical historical continuum. Transforming the traditionally “truth-evident” practices of film and photography into painting exposes methodological inconsistencies in the ruling mythos. The classical and academic field of painting, through Fenton’s divisive subject matter and decisive rendering, becomes the conduit between the physical and digital dimensions of the global citizen, archive, and spectacle. The consequences of privatizing Truth are unveiled in Fenton’s paintings where objectivity becomes impossible for any one person outside of the “in group” to know, understand or trace completely, allowing conspiracy to be the closest thing to Truth the common person can have faith in. In making work about a personal relationship to anti-humanistic ways of seeing and representing human experience, Fenton is drawn to topics, actions, or processes that incite a primordial sense of thrill, or awe, as a means of disarming and de-patterning audiences. The common ways of seeing, be it the iPhone, the 24 hour news cycle, or the Hollywood machine, are subverted in Fenton’s paintings. The sensory confusion and conditioning in Fenton’s paintings is perhaps from the exact juncture from where we can situate the work within a particular historic and social age.
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