Porter Contemporary presents Letters From Home, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Jason Bryant with an artist talk and closing reception on Thursday, May 22, 2014 from 6:30 – 8:30 PM.
With the gallery walls pitch black, Letters from Home reflects Jason Bryant’s vision of war through his beautiful hyper-realistic black and white oil paintings of classic film imagery merged with iconic visceral skateboard graphics. These paintings capture a range of emotions by literally having the bold colorful painted graphics battle with the lavish classic film imagery on the canvas. The bright, explosive graphics wage war on the canvas with paintings of iconic images from such well-known films as “Suzy”, “The Young Ones”, and “Flesh and the Devil”. Each painting becomes a metaphor for how vastly different pop cultures–film and skateboarding–work together creating these harmonious images that simultaneously show beauty, hope, loss, love, survival and hate ultimately creating a magnification of these emotions. The paintings in this exhibition use the lens of Hollywood and skateboarding culture as a foundation to explore our ideas of hope, longing, loss and how war magnifies these emotions and affects us for generations to come.
Letters From Home is Jason Bryant’s fifth solo exhibition created for Porter Contemporary. Later in 2014, Rocky Mount Arts Center near where Bryant grew up in North Carolina will host his first museum retrospective.