Monday, August 30, 2010

Drill Baby Drill Jason Clay Lewis

"Drill Baby" is my response to the horrific BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill and a nod to Sarah Palin's rally cry "Drill, Baby, Drill". The arms have the innocent victims of the disaster. On the right side of the chest is an image of the Virgin Mary holding a dripping gas nozzle. The baby's nipple also becomes Mary's exposed breast. She represents the core of the political, economical and ecological tragedy as we as a nation have a religious fervor towards oil.

Jason Clay Lewis came to New York in 1991 on a scholarship and internship at Universal Limited Art Editions. From 1992 - 1994 he worked with Jasper Johns as his personal studio assistant. Continuing his education, he graduated from The Cooper Union with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1997. Jason has been actively showing for the last several years both nationally and internationally. His work has appeared and reviewed in publications including Art In America, World of Art, Art On Paper and ZINK Magazine.

As an artist, my approach has always been, intentionally, to confound and challenge attempts to make things fit into what we already know and think. I strive to question perceived beauty, passion, life, death, and creation. I have an urgent conviction that art is a passionate and essential affair, as if a matter of life and death, where one senses the only response to death is art. Without glossing over the violence of the natural world I asks questions about man's suicidal folly, the one we call progress, a merger into a pathetic religion of commerce and profit, of false facades, and using a strategy to make us reconsider our world of visual imagery. I tinker with these visual explanations, trying to give them purpose, direction, and meaning. Always perfectly aware that knowing this constant probing does not have a sequence to a perfect solution. Atypical and fascinating, as an adventurer blending expression, analysis, and experience, I use every means and media available to explore the love of knowledge and depict limits, while trying to push those limits even farther. My interest in unique materials helps to develop my ideas of attraction verses repulsion allowing my work to have both a strong visceral feeling while maintaining a direct cerebral presence.

Jason Clay Lewis

http://www.jasonclaylewis.com/



Drill Baby 2010

Vinyl Rubber, Mohair, Oil paint, plaster, aluminum armature

18 1/4" x 9 1/4" x 6 3/4"

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