"When consciousness lingers between sleep and wakefulness, it is the most precious time. Every day i love it and every day i forget it. If ever art evokes a modicum of this mindset, it is good. This is rare. This is the aspiration of these images, these objects." ~Rem

Opening May 3rd 2016 Jason Jacques is pleased to announce the first solo show of the painting and sculpture of artist Rem Denizen. The exhibition will present three bodies of work: Inkblots with Nature and the New/Old Masters (paintings), 30-60-90 Uncanny Geometry (paintings) and the (statues) of Liberty (sculpture).

Rem Denizen is a thinker, artist, and maker currently based in Portland, Oregon, USA. Rem co-founded the Bruce High Quality Foundation, amongst other successful art based collectives, and is currently focused on the psychology of user/maker relationships in art processes through OSAP (Open Source Art Process) projects.

Rem’s Inkblot and 30-60-90 paintings appropriate pages from art books as their ground, images that are often immediately recognizable even from the corners of works as they peek through blotted ink drawings entangled with the webs of spiders or plants. Rem intends these pictures to “innocently elicit associations” in the minds of his audience, hopefully “bypassing the rational mind and inspiring active imagination” with subtle, subconscious evocation. The results are insanely beautiful and complex works.

Rem will also show several sculptures, the first of which are made from Ganoderma applanatum, a type of bracket fungus that grows in trees, also known as the artist’s bracket. These shelf fungi have been preserved through plating in copper and enamel to create purely organic forms. Other process objects are similarly memorialized. The “statues” caricaturize “the erosion of civil liberties and the idea of liberation.” ~Rem

Personal statement from Jason Jacques
This show is really the very first non-ceramic, contemporary artist solo show I have ever hosted in my gallery. So “why Rem?” one might ask. I have been collecting Rem’s artworks since his student days back pre-Bruce High Quality, when they were making waves at Cooper Union, 15 years ago. We have been friends and collaborators ever since. I have watched him develop as an artist and maker and thinker the whole way. I think he is going to be a challenging artist for many in the art world to understand. Rem is not here to impress you or sell you paintings. Rem is just living and making and doing and thinking. His entire life is a kind of artwork. He writes, dances, sings, draws, paints, sculpts, acts, practices Ayurvedic medicine, as a shaman presides over some pretty heavy weddings, is wrapping up a masters in psychology and are you following this? Rem is deep. His artwork is deeply spiritual. Yet, these artworks are for us. Can you dig it? Yes, I can.