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Consent
2006

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Jada Thompson, Memphis, TN

jadathompson.com

Artist Interview

Resides: Memphis, Tennessee

 
Jada's paintings have always been hard for me to resist. Her wit and originality as a person always come though in her art. However, to this batch of new paintings she has added some new and even more fascinating elements. The style and perspective which have provided us the lens through which to view her unique vision have turned toward a darker, more emblematic world. The bold colors, brush strokes, and unusual angles and perspectives which once revealed every-day absurdities now set up an unsentimental universe in which we engage in a precarious existential balancing act between pity and self-preservation. The tension can be excruciating.
In many of the paintings we see from the perspective of the vulnerable, yet this kind of raw and immediate presentation of their suffering allows no time or space for empathy. As viewers we are denied the reassuring sense that the compassionate witnessing of the truth helps preserve a right and just universe in which good triumphs.
The rendering of the figures gives them a kind of grotesque anonymity which allows us to observe them without pity, putting us in league with the uninterested or disinterested internal observers in the paintings-not a comfortable place to be. Whether we choose to identify with observer or observed, we are a part of what is going on, and our impulse is to pull away lest we become victims ourselves, or simply to look on unselfconsciously at the spectacle.
Also, the frame doesn't reveal as much of the scene as we'd like and acts as a kind of relentless noose closing in on the scene, leaving the viewer feeling claustrophobic and adding to the impulse to flee. We also get the discomfiting feeling that what we think we see is not always what we're really looking at, which keeps us coming back for more.

-J. Knoeller, Art Historian Masters candidate