Jeff Bailey Gallery is pleased to present Jim Gaylord, Based on True Events an exhibition of paintings and works on paper. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York.

Gaylord combines scenes from big budget action movies, capturing fleeting shapes and special effects. Through the process of painting, high-speed action sequences are distilled and dramatic conflict is suspended in time. The abstract quality of these moments suggest figures and objects in a state of metamorphosis.

Gaylord collects film stills by freezing individual scenes on the computer screen. He then digitally superimposes several film stills together, creating a composite from multiple images. These become the source material for his oil paintings and gouaches, resulting in something like painted collages. “Artifacts” from fast-moving events onscreen, such as flashes, splatters and blurs, become painterly marks when depicted on canvas or paper.

In Gaylord’s Study series, sheets of acetate are individually painted in gouache, culminating in a single image. The picture is literally built from these layers and assembled on a registration peg bar, drawing similarities to the format of traditional animation cels.

Gaylord mines numerous historical period action movies for source imagery, including The Patriot, Gladiator, The Last Samurai and Pirates of the Caribbean. Suits of armor, military uniforms and period headwear reference the figure without depicting it. Landscape backgrounds with trees and open skies serve as representational foundations for the ultimately mysterious foregrounds.

In Saber Rattle, dappled light falls onto a scene of random violence. Weapons, uniforms and clutching hands jostle for position. The image and the action are in flux, but the painting gives the direction.

The title of the exhibition, Based on True Events, references its use as a popular movie tag line. Gaylord takes the fictional reality of the movies, and distorts it into his own broken narrative.

Gaylord was a 2008 Fellow in Painting for New York Foundation for the Arts and a recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant in 2005. He has had solo exhibitions at Gregory Lind Gallery, San Francisco and Alberto Matteo Torri, Milan. His work was featured in Art On Paper 2008, at The Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina, and is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Progressive Art Collection, Ohio and the West Collection, Pennsylvania. He received his MFA from the University of California, Berkeley and a BA in Film from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Gaylord lives and works in New York.

Also On View: Paolo Arao / Drawings