Jasper Isaac
Johns

Subtle glazes on bowed, undulating, and kaleidoscopic forms evoke the intangibility of music and simulate a watery depth. I grew up in Ann Arbor where visits to the many UofM museums and the Nichols Arboretum shaped my aesthetic concerns around scientific ideology toward both a fascination and a wariness for the discipline. With motifs taken from instrument design, botany, and anatomy, my work pushes a traditional concern of the still life genre —by which a representation both is and is not what it represents— to an extreme in order to open a space unto bizarre and incongruous worlds. Resisting figuration but signifying the body through the still life, I take an oblique approach to considerations of sexuality, erotics, and spirituality, allowing me to honor what’s strange but quiet.