Dec 5th 2014

Sam Jaffe: Bleed

@ 65GRAND

1369 W. Grand Ave., Chicago IL

Opening Friday, December 5th, from 6PM - 8PM

On view through Saturday, January 10th

65GRAND is pleased to present Sam Jaffe in her second solo exhibition with the gallery, Bleed.

In this exhibition of new work Jaffe continues her investigation into the tensions between the handmade and the industrial made.

There is an experiment chemistry students often perform to demonstrate how color and dyes work: Take a strip of paper and make a dot near one end with a black marker. Hold the end of the paper in a glass of water, as it leeches upward you will see a rainbow appear displaying all the various colors that go into creating “black.” In the way most discoveries happen in the lab or the studio, for Jaffe it happened by accident. A black Crayola marker left uncapped over night bled into a sheet of paper producing a similar chromatic effect. This chance occurrence resulted not only a color scheme the artist began using-from deep black to blue to neon yellow-but it also lent the title to the exhibition.

For Jaffe, Bleed also refers to the human body and her goal of creating pieces that, “communicate with the body in personal, emotional, or interactive ways. Sometimes pieces directly reference body parts and sometimes the pieces have a sort of tactile, sensual or functional quality.”

Jaffe also states, “Above all, my work is about surrendering to materials and the fetishistic nature of material culture.” For the work in this show this includes using clothing from Forever 21, geometric armatures of laser cut wood, hair extensions and stubborn acrylic yarn knitted into fabric. This is all part of the artist’s process of accumulating an ever increasing vocabulary of materials to draw from.

Sam Jaffe lives and works in Chicago. Recent solo exhibitions include “Sam Jaffe/Sculpture” at the Contemporary Art Center, Peoria earlier this year; “Haircuts” at the Dickson Art Project Space, Waubonsee Community College, Sugar Grove, IL in 2013; and “One By One” at 65GRAND in 2012. Jaffe has participated in group exhibitions at spaces including Kitty Hawk Gallery, Sebastop, CA; Peregrine Program, Chicago; The Hyde Park Art Center; and the Union League Club, Chicago. Jaffe’s worked has been featured by Art Ltd, Bad At Sports, Make Space, Newcity, the Chicago Tribune and Time Out Chicago. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009 and her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Art & Design, where she participated in the European Honors Program in 2005.

Official Website

More events on this date

Tags: ,