Vernissage:
Venerdì 02/06/2018 ore 18:00
Tekè Gallery
Via Santa Maria 13, Carrara (MS)
Exhibition duration: dal 02/06/2018 al 28/07/2018
From June 2 to July 28, 2018, Tabularasa Teké Gallery in Carrara hosts Far Fetched, a solo exhibition by Jesse Jacobs (Moncton, 1981), a Canadian artist and one of the leading figures in the contemporary international underground scene. This marks the artist’s first solo show at the gallery and, as curator Marco Cirillo Pedri notes in the exhibition text, “his comics fully embody the spirit of a survivor from the war fought via cathode ray tubes and cutting-edge early-generation cell phones—a war aimed at dumbing down the masses, making them increasingly dependent on machines and ever less reliant on free thought (as already prophesied, among others, by Professor Bad Trip in the late ’80s and early ’90s). Jacobs’ work belongs to a branch of contemporary comics and illustration featuring numerous North American artists—Jesse Moynihan, Michael DeForge, Patrick Kyle, to name a few—who all share a background shaped by an adolescence in the ’80s and ’90s, when the psychedelia of drugs fused with the psychedelia of early video games and the first high-budget fantasy and sci-fi films.”
Jacobs’ world is inhabited by improbable anthropomorphic mutants that move and dance through various adventures, creating a zoetropic, lysergic effect that perfectly suits the title of the exhibition—Far Fetched, meaning “implausible” or “unlikely.” The show celebrates this 1980s aesthetic with black light and fluorescent colors that recall the sets of Tron or Big Trouble in Little China, brought up to date through Jacobs’ masks, which build an electro-tribal world “based on the worship of how far the human mind can go when observing creation in its most peripheral shades.” In the final room of the show, to further immerse visitors in this disorienting world, a kind of temple has been recreated to venerate the 1980s tribal cult: a pure visual celebration of a new aesthetic grounded in the evolution of thought and taste of the 8-Bit Generation.
The exhibition is open Monday to Thursday from 4 PM to 8 PM, and on Friday and Saturday from 4 PM to 10 PM. Closed on Sundays. The show is accompanied by a full-color monographic book with texts and critical essays by Marco Cirillo Pedri, Vittore Baroni, Robert Clough, Stefano Dazzi, Alessandra Ioalé, Marco Taddei, and Henry Flames. The complete iconographic apparatus of the works is accompanied by an interview with Jesse Jacobs conducted by Vittore Baroni during the artist’s winter stay in Carrara. For collectors and enthusiasts, the first 250 copies of the publication include a numbered limited edition screen print.
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