On Stellar Rays is pleased to present Shadow, JJ PEET’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. Shadow features PEET’s paintings, as well as related ceramics and bi-weekly video screenings.

While engaging in investigations and activities outside the studio, PEET gathers crushed ceramics and minerals, which are later mixed with pigments and paint and applied to handcrafted panels. The painting surfaces carry a material history that serve a broader narrative constructed by the artist over the past decade, weaving together real world events and social concerns with fictitious forces such as “The Resistants,” “Luxury Leader,” and more recently, “The Sunday Painter.” This narrative is suggested though PEET’s unique visual vocabulary; x-marks, floating heads, doubled forms, horizon lines, curtains, hats, glasses, and other utilitarian objects permeate landscapes, interiors, and ethereal spaces.

Political responsiveness is fundamental to all of PEET’s work, recently touching on topics such as the BP oil spill and America’s ongoing wars. For PEET, painting provides a more reflective and personal space to process a range of layered historical influences. He observes current affairs with more distance, in light of a longer history of America’s rise to super-power status and the questionable and often concealed political operatives that ensued. Fraught exploration of elitism, privilege and class in post-war American painting also pervade compositions.

Essential to the exhibition is a modular and mobile painting studio, entitled Shadow, from which PEET has been working since June. Shadow is at once a laboratory – the space from which the paintings in this show emerge – and itself a work-in-progress that is constantly moving and changing. Its compactness and mutability allow it to be shipped wherever the artist is, and to create works in direct response to his environment and experiences. This mobility is crucial for PEET’s imperative to experience current events in real time.

In addition to the exhibition, PEET will present The Sunday Painter Show, ten-minute episodes that are structured with elements of painting in mind.

The Sunday Painter Show episodes will be broadcast in the gallery at the following times: Sunday, September 26th, noon Sunday, October 3rd, noon Sunday, October 24th, noon

JJ PEET received his MFA from the Yale University School of Art in 2006 and his BFA from University of Minnesota in 1999. Shadow builds on his recent painting exhibition at Gallery Diet in Miami, FL (May 2010) and previous installations of sculpture, video and ceramics at On Stellar Rays (March 2009/January 2010).