A Guide to Jon Kvassay’s Body of Work
The time with our fifth artist resident Jon Kvassay came to a conclusion at the end of April. He started his journey with us on February 1st, where he put his head down and got to work on his proposed body of paintings. This guide will be slightly different, in that the guide will be to his body of work as a whole, rather than his individual works. Read on if you want more context for his body of work and process.
Firstly, the titles of each work in the slide show as they appear are as follows: Bound, Big Wins, Open Space, Survivalism, Panthers, Alone with Friends, and Cosmic.
One of the main keys to understanding Jon’s work is to know context to his life. He was born in California and spent his childhood within some of the desert landscapes of the west coast of the US. Similar to one of our previous residents Elizabeth Lax’s strategies, Jon’s work examines nostalgic memories and landscapes from his childhood. In critiques he would talk about missing the deserts of California and some specific stories of a family property there. This explains aspects of desert landscapes that appear in not just the body of work he made for feverdream, but a large number of his works in general. Some of the aspects included are desert rocks and vegetation, and desert-dwelling animals.
Within these landscapes he will sometimes hide clues of “modernity” like plant pots, and coffee mugs such as in Survivalism. And in addition to this he will include moments of the supernatural— in almost all of his works there are planet-like forms in the “skies” which he referred to as orbs or a supernatural order. This could lend the viewer to believe that his paintings are a space where multiple levels or natural reality and supernatural reality meet: where the fossils of animals past meet animals fighting for survival in the here and now, surrounded by both banal objects of the home and supernatural phenomena.
“The space you’re in isn’t sacred. Whatever happens, you can evolve with it and keep moving. ”
Animals fighting is a theme among this series. These animals are always in one way or another fighting snakes—a common symbol in the western world for treachery and evil. Sometimes the snake is winning, sometimes it is not. Sometimes predators are entangled, sometimes it’s prey. In all but one (Cosmic) there is a fossil of a dinosaur serving as a sort of memento mori, or reminder of death and mortality. Regardless, there is always struggle, and the viewer can really read personally into the work.
Another interesting aspect of Jon’s approach to artmaking to note, is that it is garnered by rules. His work always has a bold singular color that flattens the plane of his work. The instincts of his design and illustration background show through in how clearly he renders things in plain view. He utilizes only closed compositions in this work: nothing touches the edge of the canvas, everything is contained. These rules of his, in how they manifest in a formal sense leads to his work feeling taxonomical, like a taxidermist pinning delicate butterflies into a display case for examination. He is delicate and deliberate with his compositions and subjects.
Probably the most striking moment in critique with Jon was when it was brought up what really separates him from the other residents: every viewer is going to have a different favorite work in this series. While with other residents and the variety of aesthetics they explored, usually one painting would stand out among the others in their respective bodies of work as representing what they were striving for best. This is not the case with Jon. What sticks out to any viewer is going to be specific to each viewer.
And lastly, one small thing to consider is how the viewer may seen Jon in his own work given the context. There are similarities between himself and the potted succulents out of their native desert habitat, living in the trappings of modernity.
