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The New Contemporary Art Magazine
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.
John Jacobsmeyer’s oil paintings on aluminum recall nostalgic and imaginative experience, using wooden backdrops and technology-inspired shapes. These works at once feel aged and modern, and while humor runs throughout his recent works, several ring of sincerity and vulnerability. And a few others have skeleton warriors. Jacobsmeyer has cited Gene Roddenberry, Nietzsche, David Lynch, and Mary Shelley as influences.
The subjects of Brooklyn based painter John Jacobsmeyer live in a pine-wooded virtual realm. His childhood memories of building clubhouses with scrap wood were realized later in life at a struggling artist. "It Came from a Pine Box", his solo on view at Gallery Poulson in Denmark, blends what was make-believe with reality. Set in the sterile environment of a pine box, Jacobsmeyer reveals what happens behind teenagers' closed doors.