I’m very excited to announce my first big show since 2021’s UNBINDING show. AKIN is a very special exhibition because I’ll be sharing the gallery with my great aunt Joan Tanner. Here’s the press release:
AKIN – Joan Tanner and Jamie Treacy
March 23 – April 22, 2023
Artists’ reception: Saturday, March 25, 1 – 4pm
First Friday: April 7, 5 – 8pm
Artists’ talk: Saturday, April 8, 2 pm
akin
of similar nature or character
related by blood
GearBox Gallery presents AKIN, an exhibition of sculpture and drawings by Joan Tanner and painting by Jamie Treacy. These artists share a connection as great-aunt and grand-nephew with a long running dialogue about their art practices. Tanner was an early influence on Treacy’s decision to become an artist, and after he moved to California in 2004 their discourse about the practice of art increased. Now exhibiting together for the first time, this show begins by looking at the role of bravery in the life of the artist and how kinship can shore up one’s boldness.
Pastel, graphite, chalk, oil stick, ballpoint on Sanded paper
24⅜” x 35½”
Joan Tanner’s recent body of work builds on five decades of painting, sculpture, and mark-making. Her drawings present contradictory forms that emerge from an indistinguishable and murky baseline. Her sculpture resists easy interpretation but seems related to its drawn counterparts in the way she transforms industrial materials into an awkward stance capable of imminent movement.
acrylic on canvas, 30″ x 40″
Jamie Treacy’s acrylic paintings beckon one into an uneasy terrain populated with fictional plants with vague architecture. After years of carefully observing real plants, Treacy began this new series with the idea of inventing his own entangled flora. In the spirit of world-building he interrupts his opulently drawn organisms with elements of city infrastructure with pylons, pipes, fractured walls and reckless wires. Combining his love of Brutalist architecture with the practice of teaching perspective drawing, Treacy signals the viewer’s journey through a turbulent, densely intermingled, internal world.
acrylic on canvas 16″ x 21″ | 2022
Project statement for the new series:
I’m fascinated by the practice of “putting an idea on the table.” This phrase, used frequently in my life as an art educator, is meant to be a way for us to share a thought, without being emotionally attached to it… so it can be examined, and improved. Instead of it being my idea, it’s now an independent thing in the world that we can work on together. I thought about using that same process in putting an emotion on the table—to examine it, and let it live beyond my body.
To be able to talk about a feeling without it holding me hostage.
My painting practice takes the idea on the table and makes it into a physical thing, even if it’s an unnameable thing. A spectrum of my inner world is on display — from turbulent anxiety, to precise centeredness. I think of these paintings as telling a psychological story. Its cast of characters that resist easy identification, but invite wonder and comparison. These paintings on canvas are made with translucent color layers, acrylic mediums and paper fiber paste. I brush, scrape, smear, sand at the surface until a tarnished vibrancy emerges. The pictorial space is a churning and stormy world that exists somewhere from quantum to galactic scale.
I don’t know where that place is, but I’ve felt that way before. And I survived it.