QUOTES:
"Hillbilly art"?
I stumbled upon great paintings by Jesse Wiedel. I don't know if he's amateur painter or if he cunningly impersonates amateur painter. His works remind me of the stuff I see painted on amusement park rides.
posted by Fuxoft at 21:47 (Blogger from Prague)
"These are the people I work with every day"
-Eureka police officer at one of my art openings
"His art is wacktastic."
-Nicole Eisenman
"He has a hard time rescuing banality in the service of his narrative"
-David Hunt (ArtWeek magazine, May 1998)
REVIEWS:
whitehot magazine| Summer 07, WM #4: Jesse Wiedel, Haunted Trailer Park @ Jack
the Pelican Presents
Most can recall childhood excursions to the state
fair, carnivals and Coney Island. The predisposition for this revelry being
that it was an acknowledged utopia, the customary two cookie a day after dinner
limitation was released and one was allowed to luxuriate in any and all indulgence.
However, even then we could recognize the underlying sensation of horror and
unease amid the multiple delights; around the corner of each tent, or on the
tattooed arms of carnival ride controllers, the ghosts and demons lying in the
wait within the shadows between one tooth and the next. This sensation is magnified
when the bacchanal departs, leaving in its wake muddy potholes and empty cups.
The same is true of the American landscape. Perhaps serving as a parallel to
the American culture, remnants of former celebrations and success litter our
epic roadsides in the form of rundown motel signs and abandoned novelties, the
resulting sensation being one of unease and nervous sentimentality.
In Jesse Wiedel's work, now showing at Jack The Pelican Presents in Brooklyn, we are reminded of these same conflicting sensations of festivity and abandonment. His self-described "narrative streetscapes" draw upon a variety of influences including people watching, old motel signs and spaces with a feeling of loss. The brightly colored palette of Wiedel's work is in contrast to the humorously grim subject matter, resulting in the reaction that Wiedel himself would want the viewer to have, and that is uncomfortable half-laughter.
Jesse Wiedel's work is like the purge after the binge, lacking the spiritual awakening or cleansing affect of an actual purge. While some imagery may allude to spirituality, we get the sensation that Wiedel is actually making fun of spirituality, and that he is not in fact pointing at these particular characters or cultural group for exploitative purposes unto themselves, but rather exposing our culture as a whole as inventing the symptom of nostalgia for the American dream.
In short, Wiedel's work is rife with ridiculousness in the way in which one can appreciate. Just when a definition or narrative seems to emerge, another anomaly makes itself known. When an arcane subtext materializes, it is immediately banished by something silly or fantastical. If one would criticize Wiedel for comical lucidity, they would be slapped immediately with what would appear to be social commentary.
Jesse Wiedel's work therefore elicits the similar echoes of past events or places in time that have gone extinct, while we grasp to try to hang onto the celebration of that moment. These ghostly, disgusting and comical narratives leave us in a state of nervous laughter.
-Jennifer Gilles
ArtWeek magazine. Sept. 2005:
‘The Big Brush Off’
Wiedel’s ordinary suburban scenes are some of the creepiest in the show. Painted in a mode less fantastical and more deadpan, these works look quite straightforward, except for one horrible detail. The Hackey Sack Murders shows four young guys playing hackey sack on a little patch of dirt in a mobile home park. Just behind them, an older guy has another man wearing some kind of hat or headdress pinned down on the grass, maybe already lifeless. The kids carry on, oblivious or impervious to the violence taking place right next to them. Such apathy or blindness functions all too well as a metaphor for the everyday horrors in the world that too often go ignored.
-Debra Koppman
'Buster'
Jesse Wiedel visited the gallery a month or so ago. Our commitment to his inclusion in this group show at AFHGC was nearly immediate. Most of Jesse’s current work is on view now in a well-received exhibit at Jack Pelican Presents in Brooklyn. “Clash of Titans” is recent (2006), but does not demonstrate the dreamy poetics this year’s offerings. Jesse’s painting approach involves up to “Clash” a compartmentalization or area focus that on first-glance appears naive. It is anything but. Jesse Wiedel’s vision is literary, sophisticated and historical. It’s Jesse’s choice of content, or rather the subjects/actors in his story excerpts/paintings, that encourage the percolation of class identity/experience in the viewer. It’s a clever play, which suggests authorial passive aggressiveness, or at least the artist’s provocateur bent, until one considers the confusion inherent in the social realities rendered in Mr. Wiedel’s paintings. Although Jesse is careful to cloak his play, one begins to notice that the body of a work on whole has more in common with The Grapes of Wrath than it has with Howard Finster. As Jesse Wiedel’s work evolves, and his painting chops and strategies become more sure and comprehensive, the artist’s narrative excellence emerges as one of his great attributes. Jesse is capable of approaching the epic as a painter.
-Paul McLean, Art For Humans Gallery. 2007
Catalog Text:
The Subnormal Discourse
This exhibition concerns itself with narrative art—art that tells specific stories. Some of the paintings are straightforward single panel works that capture a moment in an open-ended tale. Other multi-panel paintings reveal an unfolding story in the formal manner of traditional religious altarpieces—an important source of inspiration for these works. Storyboards (small drawings that describe individual scenes for a film production) are also a component of this exhibit. Displayed together, the paintings, triptychs, and storyboards relate conceptually and thematically, but also emphasize the differences between these three methods of visual communication. The individual paintings present isolated moments in an often ambiguous tale, while the triptychs and storyboards convey specific fragments of a more elaborately articulated narrative.
The paintings tell stories about life on the margins in small-town America—inscrutable tales generated by the complex and often dysfunctional interactions between individuals and their familiar and habitual landmarks. The seemingly inarticulate, awkward characters in these paintings respond to their situations with a cryptic pantomime that can be bewildering to the casual viewer. Some of the scenarios in these pictures are absurdly humorous, yet others are disturbing meditations on social dysfunction and class distinctions in our culture. The title Subnormal Discourse refers to the often distinctive, cryptic, and hermetic communication styles amongst people that inhabit places aversive to middle class values—places that include ‘slums’, bars, and back alleys.
The peculiar and even sometimes surrealistic practices of apocalyptic Christian faiths and their paraphernalia of indoctrination and conversion inform many of these pictures. Traditional Church altarpieces in particular can indoctrinate with vivid elegance, and also serve as a loci of mystical veneration. The altarpiece-like triptychs in this exhibition deploy some of the grand narrative strategies of these great historical works, but at the same time undermine their mystical status by replacing exalted subjects with dubious ones. The triptych Altarpiece for Preacher Bob, for example, captures the tale of a murderous trucker seeking salvation on his CB radio in the left panel, a roadside church standing stoically in the center panel, while on the right the trucker grimly offers the severed body parts of one of his victims before a desolate roadside wilderness.
The storyboards in this exhibit were created for the independent film screenplay For a Day or a Lifetime, written by Kenneth Thomas and M. Violet Leonard. The film is an account of a group of small town aesthetes preyed upon by a mysterious shadowy serial killer. One suite of charcoal drawings portrays a violent encounter between the protagonists and a crusty, pot-bellied beach resident. Additional scenes describe bleak, alienating landscapes inhabited by inanimate objects that produce a feeling of inexplicable creeping fear. Indeed, all the works in this show seem to celebrate failure in both ominous and humorous ways. But often an artwork’s imperfections, like an individual’s character flaws, elicit in both greater complexity and depth.
-Jesse Wiedel and Cynthia Hooper 1/17/04