contact

jasonwatson999@gmail.com

https://www.instagram.com/jasonwatsonart/

bio

Jason Watson is a mixed-media artist and educator, whose studio practice combines interests in fractured figures, found objects, and fragments of text and pattern as visual materials that both reveal and conceal elusive layers of meaning. His work has been shown at galleries, universities, and non-profit spaces including the drawing installation “Q” at the Mint Museum, the group exhibition “Following Threads” at the Greenhill Center for North Carolina Art, and the contemporary drawing survey “Line ,Touch, Trace” at the North Carolina Museum of Art. His artist residencies over the past several years include the Newark Museum of Art, Cooper Union Emerging Artist Residency Program, the Lower East Side Printshop, the Elsewhere Artist Collaborative, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Oberpfalzer Kunstlerhaus in Schwandorf, Germany. He recently participated in the Lincoln Center Summer Education Forum and completed a residency with the Goodyear Artist Collaborative in November 2018.

Watson was awarded the first Wesley Mancini Artist Residency at the McColl Center for Visual Art + Innovation in 2013. He has presented papers and projects at national academic conferences including “Creating in the Queer Diaspora”, a study of LGBTQ creative production in non-urban areas with Queer Caucus for Art at the College Art Association. As an art educator, Watson has taught a wide variety of drawing, painting, and printmaking classes and workshops over the past two decades at colleges, universities, and arts non-profits. Most recently, he taught drawing and life drawing at Central Piedmont Community College and served as the Director of Visual Art Programs for Arts+, a non-profit in Charlotte that provides art education to underserved populations. He is currently pursuing a Masters degree in Art Education at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City.

statement

Drawing from observation is my personal translation of the physical world into images that test and tease meaning. I draw, paint, and collage to investigate and manipulate structures, spaces, and surfaces; to play with how meaning attaches to visual ideas or abandons those ideas through the creative process.

I am interested in how drawn and collaged images, particularly of faces, fractured bodies, and used objects, both reveal and obscure private histories. Portrait busts, figurative sculpture, and all matter of domestic material (furniture parts, torn clothing, fragments of interior architecture…) intrigue me with both their potential to tell specific stories, and to keep the details of those stories hidden within slight gestures or mysterious marks of use.

For this reason, I am particularly drawn to two contradictory types of spaces to find subject matter for my work: museum collections and thrift stores. I am fascinated by the infinite possibilities of individual triumph or folly that could place an object or a body in one of these environments. The first curates and cares for objects that have been venerated through time and association with particular people or events; the second temporarily houses objects that have been discarded and no longer seem useful or fashionable to contemporary eyes. Travel to museums, thrift stores and similar “collections”, to gather image material for my work, is a vital part of my creative process. Back in my studio, I play with these images by combining them on the page and testing different visual combinations. I then draw and redraw, stain and layer these faces, forms, and letters until satisfying compositions emerge. Each final mixed media piece is like a Victorian theatrical tableau, actors and props caught in a suspended state, always on the brink of action, suggesting intentions and back stories that hang in a state of open interpretation, like a movie poster in a foreign language that you cannot translate. I think of this state of unfixed meaning as one of narrative potential; I often discuss how the meaning of my drawings and collages is intentionally and continually in flux, for both myself and the viewer.