Jason Eisner

The roadways of America are the arteries of our mobility, but seldom are they ever thought of as beautiful. Notwithstanding, along their lengths exists a curious and almost invisible culture… a culture dedicated to passing through quickly and conveniently to a desired destination. The work in this exhibition was inspired by a recent road trip through the Midwest. Resisting the seductive power of the roadway culture of denial, I took careful note of the landscape along the way: Billboards, Logging Trucks, Puffy Clouds and Electrical Towers, Trees and Grass divided by Cement- such forms randomly and disharmoniously cluttered together filled me with an overwhelming melancholy. My aim was to work within this feeling using a variety of medium to construct a museum for the overlooked and neglected Middle American landscape.

Brent Owens

The most formative of my days as a child were those spent drawing during sermons in the back pew of a balcony in a Southern Baptist church. The spirit of my work on those Sunday mornings remained a constant in my life and developed the sensibility with which I approach my work today. The work I produce is characterized by a humorous rebellious quality, a sense of irreverence, and an abiding loyalty to that which the work both rebukes and rebels against. This is a reflection not only of the mood produced by those times, beset by the opposing forces of adolescent development and dogmatic rule, but also of my current observations of social order. Primed by those earlier experiences, my current focus is the discrepancy between animal instinct and human intellectual enterprise that produces such amazing exercises in folly. My work retains the stylistic flavor imparted upon my aesthetic consciousness by my coming of age in the rural south. I think of my practice as a kind of phenomenological tinkering, whereby I attempt to wrangle everyday experience into an expression of simultaneous lament and embrace that resonates with the plight and folly of everyday people.