Raandesk Gallery of Art is pleased to announce Trilogy, a solo exhibition of paintings by Jason Bryant. The exhibition’s eight large-scale paintings are organized in three distinct conceptual series informally identified as Rubric, Merging Iconography and Symbolic Portraiture. Trilogy is a continuation and further exploration of Bryant’s fascination with film, skateboarding culture and the presentation of the self. The body of work showcases his signature photorealistic style through aggressive compositional cropping and the uniform editing out of a subject’s eyes with highly technical refinement.

“Bryant’s paintings address aspects of self-identity and perception through varying viewpoints of portraiture,” explains Jessica L. Porter, owner of Raandesk Gallery of Art. “The works featured in Trilogy are both intimate and personal, but still invite viewer participation and interpretation.”

Rubric

Four paintings comprise the Rubric series. Based on source images of iconic black and white stills from classic Hollywood films like The Wild One (1947) starring Marlon Brando, and Bringing Up Baby (1938) starring Katharine Hepburn and Carey Grant, Bryant builds canvases that evoke a dramatic, cinematic format. He then adds subtitles to the bottom of the composition, creating dissonance between the overall image and the meaning of the copy. These subtitles are either of Bryant’s own creation or plucked from the cultural landscape of song lyrics and movie dialogue ultimately changing the complexion of the original film still.

Merging Iconography

Comprised of two paintings, these works serve to combine two aspects of Bryant’s life by merging skateboarding icons into paintings of black and white film stills. Employing trompe l’oeil, the brightly colored skate graphics, interact with the canvas and the picture plane in mischievous and playful ways. Bryant presents viewers with a complex view of himself and popular culture through the juxtaposition of elegant, silver screen stills and raw, aggressive skateboarding graphics.

Symbolic Portraiture

Continuing in his tradition of portraiture, the two paintings in Symbolic Portraiture confront the viewer with the back of female subjects, dressed in t-shirts, which depict album cover art. The artist and album cover presented is an identification and portraiture device, presenting a specific facet of an individual’s personality to the viewer.

About the Artist

Jason Bryant was born in 1976 in Wilson, North Carolina and lives and works in New York City. He received his BFA in Painting from East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina in 1999, before completing his MFA at Maryland institute College of Art in 2004. He has had solo exhibitions in New York, Maryland, and North Carolina, and has been included in group exhibitions throughout the U.S. and internationally, at venues including Il Ramo d’oro in Naples, Italy; The Show Room in Nashville, Tennessee; Gallery 32 in London, England, and The Hemicycle Gallery in Washington, D.C.