John Jacobsmeyer’s plywood backdrops contain scenes that explore fantastical narratives, and lately, video game culture in particular. In his debut show at Jonathan Levine Projects, titled “Great Feats and Defeats,” continues a fascination with wood for the artist that reaches back to his childhood. The artist says that “rotary sawn pine plywood is cheap yet durable and along with being used as sub-flooring and fencing for construction sites. It’s also the material twelve-year-old children will use to build clubhouses in the woods where they’ll rule their own kingdoms, wage wars and rebuild bigger and wilder each time.” Jacobsmeyer was last featured on HiFructose.com here.
What this show looks at is how “nostalgic fantasy life in the woods has been replaced by the seductive narratives of video games,” a statement says. This show poses this question: “If time were reversed and analog followed digital, if plywood clubhouses were made in order to bring video game narratives into the real world, how would that look? How would that story play out?”
The show kicks off today and runs through March 17. See more works from the show below.
Matthew Grabelsky's oil paintings are at the center of a show currently running at Dorothy Circus Gallery in London. The artist is known for infusing everyday subway scenes with his realistically rendered animal-human hybrids, with “Passengers” collecting five new works and four studies. The show runs through Jan. 5 at the space.
We previously featured Australian artist 
As a young girl, artist 
Beijing based artist DU Kun incorporates his passion for rock music into his new oil painting series titled "Revels of the Rock Gods". His works, which just debuted at Mizuma Gallery in Tokyo, Japan, are monumental portraits of rock musicians that appear carved out of mountains, cliffs, oceans, stones, trees and waterfalls. His first profession while he was in art school was as a rock musician himself, and has since frequently demonstrated his musical prowess. The artist began working on his "Gods of Rock Festival" series in 2014, creating the works out of his own experience with rock music.