JESSE MCCLOSKEY: Night Gallery
September 10 - October 16, 2022
Reception September 10, 5-7pm
LISTEN TO AN INTERVIEW ABOUT THE SHOW ON WUSB 90.1 FM
The Arts Center at Duck Creek is pleased to present Jesse McCloskey: Night Gallery, opening on Saturday, September 10, and on view through Sunday, October 16, 2022. A reception for the artist will be held from 5-7 pm on Saturday, September 10. The artist will speak about his work on site at 2pm on October 2, 2022.
During the COVID-19 lockdown, Jesse McCloskey's studio building in Brooklyn emptied out as many artists left the city. He spent this quiet, uninterrupted time assembling the series of works featured in Night Gallery: cutting and collaging shapes of paper and other mixed media together, looking for what de Kooning called the “Flickering Glimpse” of form. Inspired by de Kooning’s aforementioned aesthetic philosophy, McCloskey's paintings wax and wane between representation and abstraction, the push and pull of form in painting of which Hans Hoffman also spoke. “It’s a battle for clarity and surprise through form that has forced a distillation of my work down to a few themes: sex, death, and my studio,” McCloskey explains. “While the subjects I choose to paint are a constant source of love, desire, and need, it’s the craving of something almost out of site —something I can’t see until it arrives in the paintings—that I really want, so I work them until it does. This is how they become heavily layered, excavated, then papered over again and again until the representational and the abstract come together.”
Jesse McCloskey (b. 1964, Quincy, Massachusetts) is a New York-based artist hailing from a tiny town in Massachusetts where little abandoned cemeteries list smallpox victims and stories of accused witches lay buried near the town green. His latest solo exhibitions include “Romantic Poison” at SRO Gallery, NY and “Making a Scene” at Site 57 Gallery, NY. The artist’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, most recently at 490 Atlantic Gallery in Brooklyn, NY; Brooklyn Collage Collective, Brooklyn, NY; and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts, NY. He received a BFA from the Swain School of Design in Massachusetts and a MFA from Parsons School of Design in New York.
For further information or additional images, contact Jess Frost at duck@duckcreekarts.org.
For more information about this artist, please visit www.jessemccloskey.com
