Jeff Bailey Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Jered Sprecher, titled Divided Light.
How much does digital space influence our sense of real space? Sprecher’s paintings don’t so much split the difference as reveal how both spaces blend together. His paintings are filtered not only through perception and memory, but also a Google search.
In 2013 Sprecher was an artist-in-residence at Chinati, in Marfa, Texas. He was taken by the clear, bright almost blinding light there. Simultaneously, he took many digital photographs of the surrounding landscape. Their uploaded glow from his computer screen or handheld tablet provided another source of light: one where digital facsimiles of suns and moons invite our gaze like the actual ones depicted.
Both nature and technology can invoke awe. In nature, we find an immense, infinitely complex system, larger than us. In technology, we encounter streams of information, a burgeoning garden within the world we inhabit.
The literary critic Leo Marx examined the idea of the “machine in the garden.” As we move through each day the relationship of the machine and the garden shift and re-orient. Sprecher’s paintings reflect how our place in this garden-machine is always changing.
This is Jered Sprecher’s fifth exhibition at the gallery. Other solo exhibitions include Gallery 16, San Francisco and Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston. Group exhibitions include the Drawing Center, New York and the Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Greensboro, NC. His work is currently on view in Anxious Abstraction at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas. Sprecher has been an artist in residence at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas. In 2009 he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. He received a BA in History and Studio Art at Concordia University, Seward, Nebraska and an MA and MFA in painting from the University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA. Sprecher lives and works in Knoxville, Tennessee.