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TETRAGRAMMATRON

Jason Robert Bell
A Ten Year Retrospective

December 9 - January 21, 2007
Artists Reception: Sunday, January 7, 2-5pm

"TETRAGRAMMATRON," a ten-year retrospective of work by Jason Robert Bell guest curated by Susan Classen-Sullivan, Associate Professor of Art at Manchester Community College and Director of the Hans Weiss Newspace Gallery there, will take place at the John Slade Ely House in New Haven, CT. December 9th, through January 21st, with a reception for the artist on Sunday, January 7 from 2- 5pm. Bell, a Yale M.F.A. graduate, who has exhibited widely with great acclaim, creates multidimensional, aggressively heartfelt works of dynamic visual and conceptual proportions. Using paint, glitter, paper, tape, monsters, allegory and anything he can get his mind and hands on, this artist takes us on epic adventures into legendary and contemporary mythology. Personal and societal beliefs and desires are also explored throughout the work. He offer us a kaleidoscopic weaving of myth religion, and elements of individual and societal behavior, and shows how they are each parts of the whole of human experience. Bell creates a lush extravaganza of a world in which trash is treasure, comic books are an ultimate visual expression, and our most cherished beliefs and needs are laid bare.

Curatorial Statement

Jason Robert Bell, a Yale M.F.A. graduate, who has exhibited widely with great acclaim, creates multidimensional, aggressively heartfelt works of dynamic visual and conceptual proportions. Using paint, glitter, paper, tape, monsters, allegory and anything he can get his mind and hands on, this artist takes us on epic adventures into legendary and contemporary mythology. Personal and societal beliefs and desires are also explored throughout the work.

In his “Kala” drawings and paintings we see just how robust and muscular Bell’s work can be. Kala is shown rampaging with abandon through dangerous scenes of violence and carnage. Realized in harsh aggressive colors and rendering style, she is all-powerful, both life-giving and destroying, while remaining continually vulnerable to her environment. Clearly, she embodies all of our most giving and destructive tendencies, as well as our fragility.

In all of his work Bell is gallantly successful in offering an illuminated vision of what drives us emotionally and psychologically. As in the “Kala” works his comic books, (with stunning images created by Bell and friends), we are brought on a series of raucous escapades, which relate to our own desires to have and consume. We devour these visual fantasies while maintaining our safety with their pages. Bell has us here with our wish to be as fully engaged with our lives as the characters in these comic books, while simultaneously harboring a fear of actually doing so.

Like Kala, Bell’s work is both generous and brutal. In his “Trashures” we are given the opportunity to interact with and co-create sculptural works that he leaves about for just this purpose. These viewer interactive works at once compel us to participate and reveal our reluctance to encounter and engage with anything new. With his “Art of the Month” works, much like a fruit of the month club, we receive our own personal original artwork once a month. Here, as with the comic books, we have art as commodity while our own desire to consume is also portrayed. This is also expressed in other art products Bell makes available to us for purchase such as “Golden Unicorn Turds” and the “Invisible Donkey Removal” service, our relationship to which is equally enchanting and damning. Here Bell explores our tendency to try to find a way of escaping the mundanity of life, perhaps by purchasing it, and reveals our the wish to believe life is mysterious and magical. This basic human desire for wonder is also evidenced in Bell’s mail art, in which we might receive, through the mail, a random object, such as a bright orange paper mache ball crisscrossed with black duct tape. Upon receiving such an object we find what we have been most waiting for is more remarkable than and nothing like we could have imagined.

Looking at the huge and wide ranging body of work Bell has created over the last ten years makes his brilliance and mission equally apparent. He offers us a kaleidoscopic weaving of myth, religion, and elements of individual and societal behavior, and shows how they are each parts of the whole of human experience. Bell communicates to us who we are and what we are capable of. In doing so, he creates a lush extravaganza of a world in which trash is treasure, comic books are an ultimate visual expression, and our most cherished beliefs and needs are laid bare. And all of it, for good or evil, is within reach.

Susan Classen-Sullivan
Guest Curator and Curator/Director of the Hans Weiss Newspace Gallery at Manchester Community College.

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