JPW3 "Carbon Sink"

JPW3 "Carbon Sink"

11 December 2020 – 27 February 2021

Soft Opening:
Thursday, 10 Dec. 2020, 11am – 8pm

American Dream

JPW3's image of the Grim Reaper is named after an Indian cult object, the dreamcatcher. A dreamcatcher consists of a net in a willow hoop, which is decorated with personal or sacred objects such as certain feathers or beads. The dreamcatcher is believed to improve sleep. It is assumed that the good dreams go through the net, the bad ones get caught in it and are later neutralized by the morning sun. A reminiscence of a pre-American civilization, which is more connected to nature and the natural world, the 'dreamcatcher' has been reified into a mass-produced souvenir.

The American dream describes the myth of equal opportunity, which is characterized by the total autonomy of the individual. 70 million Trump voters, mostly white (including many older white men with a low level of education, it is often said), but also People of Color, Native Americans, Hispanic immigrants and women, have, in the midst of a pandemic with catastrophic consequences for especially the weaker members of society, just shown once again that the right to own weapons and the right to exploit natural resources is more important to them than the right to health insurance.

It is a cynical contradiction that it is precisely the "humiliated and offended" victims of the system of neoliberal-style capitalism who prefer to take pride in being Americans rather than being nothing at all, at the expense of their own protection by the state.

The colors red, white and blue of the ‘Star sprangled banner’ have their origin in the Union Jack as the flag of the English colonies. Their symbolism in the star banner is: white for purity and innocence, red for valor and hardiness and blue for vigilance, perseverance and justice. JPW3's canvas and wax flag paintings play with a different color symbolism. While pastel and earth tones remind us of the look of Hispanic mural paintings, black is the color of mourning, but also the proud color of the Black Lives Matter movement. His flags are transgressive paraphrases of the Stars and Stripes icon. At the same time, they refer to Jasper John's "Flags", which are now among the most expensive works of art of the 20th century and thus represent a kind of accelerating American dream story fueled by an overheated art auction market that is drenched with money in an almost surreal way.

The title of the exhibition Carbon Sink refers to the finite resources of our unbalanced (social) eco-system, where there are few winners and many losers. The planet is overheated, has a fever.
Carbon sinks (such as forests and oceans) have played a cooling role in the Earth's climate since time immemorial, because they absorb greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and thus mitigate the greenhouse effect.

JPW3 makes use of the artistic means of 'transferring' images into/onto storage materials, like the extremely old and long-lasting wax for instance. For his latest works, he uses UV prints on gator foam or canvas, which he then works on with acrylic or marker. His aesthetics are rooted in the tradition of 20 C painting experiments from Jasper Johns to Robert Rauschenberg to Fluxus. They find their own contemporary repertoire in the signs of the loss of the kind of orientation that culture once offered but can no longer provide in the ongoing process of commodification of all areas of life.