黑料不打烊

Since childhood, Jared Small has been captivated with the beauty of gentle decay in his surroundings. He sees the structure of the Victorian home, aging amidst the warm, lush vegetation of Memphis and the Delta region, as a portal into layered narratives of the past. Painting from photographs and his imagination, a sense of magical realism envelopes his compositions of homes, flowers, and portraits. These subjects become mysterious artifacts symbolizing the cycles of seasons, death, and rebirth. His surfaces are brilliant, glossy, almost glamorous - a marked but pleasing contrast to the peeling paint, sagging rooflines, broken windows, and wilting petals of age and dilapidation. Where the subject meets the background, realistic edges dissolve into a translucent, haunting abstraction, as if crossing into another realm. The viewer is lulled into a dream-like state, caught between the realities of the obvious image and the histories, memories, and possibilities that lay beneath the surface.