Jamie Vasta

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Current & Upcoming:

January 6 - 27, 2012

Wartime Revival of the Senses

group show

Rock Paper Scissors Collective

2278 Telegraph Ave, Oakland CA

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Art

Works 2007-2011

After Caravaggio
Sirens and Sea Shanties
The Hunt
Mustn't

After Caravaggio

Salome 1609
detail of St. John
Narcissus 1603
detail of Narcissus
St. John in the Wilderness
The Entombment 1602
The Lute Player
Judith and Holofernes
Fillide 1596
detail of Fillide
Youth with a Basket of Fruit
The Incredulity of Thomas
Bacchus 1596
detail of Bacchus
Study for Bacchus
Amor Vincit Omnia
Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy
Amor Vincit Omnia
Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy

Sirens and Sea Shanties

detail of Sirens 3
Oh my old mother
Long we've tossed
Sirens 1
Sirens 2
detail of Sirens 3
Sirens 3
Oh the ocean waves do roll
Then I know I'll never go to
Only one more day a'workin'
Oh Lord if dreams were only
Sirens 4
Then three times around spun
Don't haul on the rope don't
I'm drowned in the lowland sea
Sirens opening

The Hunt

Zoe
Virginia
Heather
Kayla's Big Buck
Desiree
Fawn
Skylar and Madi with Geese
Bristol
Sara
Jenna's Doe
Becky
Mallory

Mustn't

As White As Snow
The Knife
Red Delicious
Beseecher
Feral
Binding
Will O' the Wisp
In the Rushes
The Cherry Tree
Cottontail
Stepsister
Scarcely a Leaf Left
Three Apples
The Traveller
Bear

Press

Artillery

Artillery Magazine

July/August 2011By Barbara MorrisGLITTER? THOSE ENCOUNTERING the paintings of Jamie Vasta in her new show After Caravaggio will find, rather rapidly, the works defy preconceptions about the medium of glitter and the playful associations one might conjure up - from Ke$ha to glue wielding tots, to drag queens. Vasta, a Bay Area-based artist, has been painting in glitter for ten years now. Her works grapple withcomplex, serious, even morbid subjects of sex and power, which are often filtered through a literary lens of re-imagined myths and dark, feminist reworkings of fairy tales. Earlier bodies of work highlighted young girls stalking and butchering men who intruded on their mysterious wooded lair.In honor of the 400th anniversary of his death last year, Vasta chose to undertake a series of works inspired by one of her favorite artists, Caravaggio. Sticking to her working process ofusing friends and associates as models, Vasta mirrors Caravaggio's practice of using common people — in his case, fellow artists, friends and prostitutes — to portray angels, saints, Jesus and the Virgin. Vasta's subjects often replicate the gesture of Caravaggio's, but the artist regards the composition of the original more as a suggestion than a template. Not surprisingly,Vasta recasts her crew in roles irrespective of gender, a solution that Caravaggio, with androgynous models and sexual ambiguity deeply interwoven into his oeuvre, would certainly have applauded.

SFBG 2011

San Francisco Bay Guardian

All that glittersMatt SussmanCreated 04/12/2011 - 5:16pmJamie Vasta updates Caravaggio for the literary queerHAIRY EYEBALL What happens to appropriation after camp? That's the intriguing question posed and answered by Jamie Vasta's glitzy and technically impressive homage to late 16th- and early 17th-century Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, currently hanging at Patricia Sweetow.Working from photographs of famous Caravaggio paintings playfully restaged by her circle of friends (maybe you've seen some of them out and about at queer and/or literary events?), Vasta painstakingly reproduces the images on wood panel using several Michael's craft stores' worth of colored glitter.There's performance artist Alisia Waller as Judith beheading Holofernes with a butcher knife. Bacchus, whom Caravaggio famously depicted as visibly ill from too much drink, has been transformed into a cheerful woman who, champagne flute aloft mid-toast, looks no worse for wear on her living room couch. (Perhaps it's due to the empty pill bottles Vasta scattered in the foreground, along with the mountain of produce that supplants the original's modest ripe peaches and grape bunch.) A red swath of fabric and nudity are all that connect the 1602 St. John the Baptist to his contemporary, Chihuahua-holding female counterpart.Vasta's most dramatic reworking is Deposizione, 1602, which transports the downward cascade of mourning figures in the monumental Entombment of Christ (1602) to a Northern California beach at low tide, and trades the original's obfuscatory black background for the shimmery blue mirror of sea-against-sky.Caravaggio was as famous for his dramatic chiaroscuro as for his unprecedented naturalism, and Vasta pays as much attention to approximating the shades of black behind her subjects as she does their skin tone or the folds of the blankets they're posed on. It's doubly impressive that, while working with an entirely different medium, she is able to impart the palpable physicality of light falling on the lapel of a dark blazer or waves gently lapping over sunlit shoals.Vasta's casting choices are undoubtedly a cheeky nod to Caravaggio's controversial use of courtesans and common folk as live models for his biblical subjects. But her paintings function as portraits in their own right of San Francisco's current queer milieu, as much as they are tributes to another artist. And despite their sparkling surfaces, they are not as campy in their methods or didactic in their aim as, say, Yasumasa Morimura's photographic interventions into the Western art historical cannon.Caravaggio, however, is certainly no stranger to queer advances. After his rediscovery by art historians in the early 20th century, he became something of a cause célèbre for queer male artists such as filmmaker Derek Jarman, who were moved by — perhaps as the poet Thom Gunn was while gazing at Saul/Paul's ecstasy in The Conversion of St. Paul (1600) — the painter's recognition of some hidden sensuous reverse: "an alternate/Candour and secrecy inside the skin."Vasta's subjects harbor no secrets. Appropriate to our time and place, they wear their desire on their sleeves (if they're wearing sleeves at all) and stand with the casual stance and relaxed mien of someone posing for a photo bound for a Facebook wall, or in the case of the full-frontal cupid of Amor Vincit Omnia, 1602, an Adam4Adam profile.Perhaps it's simply for lack of wall space (or modesty concerns?) that you have to duck into the gallery's back office to see Cupid — once a pudgy adolescent with marble flesh, now a more well-endowed scruffy 20-something — in all his glory. Certainly there is no trace of the "unfathomable nature of the erotic" that contemporary art historians Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit flagged in Caravaggio's original. Vasta's glittering cherub isn't sending out any mixed signals: love has conquered all.JAMIE VASTA: AFTER CARAVAGGIOPatricia Sweetow GalleryThrough May 1477 Geary, Mezzanine level, SF(415) 788-5207www.patriciasweetowgallery.com [2]

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San Francisco Examiner

Conversation 5 at the San Francisco Art Commission GalleryMicaela Van ZwollSF Contemporary Art ExaminerJuly 24, 2009Last night, I attended a preview reception for Conversation 5: Jamie Vasta and Nicholas Pye & Sheila Pye, at the San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) Gallery.Jamie Vasta, Sirens #3Jamie Vasta’s presentation, from a recent series entitled, Sirens, is a collection of four works ranging in size from a sweetly 16 x 16 inches to an imposing panel 6 x 6 feet square. Renowned for exuberant paintings depicting dark and dramatic narratives, Vasta “paints” with glitter. The resulting surface is beautiful and enticing – drawing the viewer closer. In my case, I was so attracted by her medium, that I didn’t perceive her subject matter until later. Often violent and, in this case, replete with active and implied movement, Vasta’s subject matter is compelling for its psychological and sexual content. Her works, resident on the floor and on the walls of the SFAC Gallery, are shown in a manner that purposefully directs the viewer to contemplate her work from a perspective of power - reinforcing the artist’s theme (based on mythical tales of sirens luring sailors to their death) and intent to push the viewer “to reflect on gender-based power dynamics” (SFAC press release). The dramatic scale, positioning of the viewer in relation to the subject matter, expression of her subjects, and medium was impossible to ignore. (image: Jamie Vasta. Sirens #3, 2009. Glitter on panel. 72 x 72 inches. Courtesy of Patricia Sweetow Gallery)Nicholas Pye & Sheila Pye, Loudly, Death UntiesLoudly, Death Unties, 2007, is a single channel HD video of 11 minutes by Nicholas Pye and Sheila Pye. A young couple from Montréal, Canada, the Pyes have been making films and photographs together, integrating their collective interests in performance, cinema, and large format still photography, in addition to their individual practices since 2001. Their work has been widely exhibited internationally in art galleries, museums, film festivals, and was recently acquired by the Smithsonian Institutution's Hirshhorn Museum. The final film of a trilogy of works about relationships, Loudly, Death Unties is about the death of a lover. Employing Irish folklore, the piercing wail of a Banshee announces the inevitable death of someone. In Loudly, Death Unties, a Banshee, in the form of a little girl, arrives and through a series of uncanny events, forces one lover to say goodbye to the other. This film, making its Bay Area premiere, received rave reviews in Artforum, Art in America and Art News. (image: Nicholas Pye & Sheila Pye, Loudly, Death Unties, 2007, single channel HD video, 11 minutes. Courtesy of Nicholas Pye and Sheila Pye)Conversation 5 is the SFAC’s latest production of its ongoing exhibition series, Conversations. The San Francisco Art Commission's series, Conversations, features local artists vis-à-vis an artist from another point on the globe, and intends to provide a framework for discussion regarding the Bay Area’s participation in an international contemporary art dialogue.For more info: Jamie Vasta, SFAC, Nicholas Pye & Sheila Pye, SFAC press release, Smithsonian Institution, Hirshhorn Museum, Artforum, Art in America, Art News.

SF Chronicle

San Francisco Chronicle

'Conversation 5': 1 S.F. artist, 1 out-of-townNirmala NatarajThursday, July 23, 2009SF Arts Commission Gallery"Loudly, Death Unties," a video work by Toronto artists Nicholas and Sheila Pye, "really fit with what I was trying to do with my work," says San Francisco painter Jamie Vasta.View Larger ImageThe latest exhibition at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, "Conversation 5," explores gender dynamics, the unpredictability of intimate relationships and the pervasiveness of mythic images of the polar forces of desire and terror. The works of San Francisco painter Jamie Vasta and Toronto husband-and-wife filmmaking duo Nicholas and Sheila Pye use similar narratives and figures to create fairy tales swimming in lush colors and sexy danger.Gallery Director Meg Shiffler created the series of "Conversation" exhibitions in late 2005. The concept was that a local artist would be showcased alongside an artist from another point on the globe. "This format teaches us about how our local art production is involved in an international dialogue," she says.The current exhibition unites the featured artists "both in their narrative devices and their concern for formal beauty," according to Shiffler. The SFAC Gallery, which encourages local artists to experiment, is including three works by Vasta that are the largest pieces of her career. And while the Pyes have achieved notoriety internationally, they are making their local debut.Vasta's darkly sensual works explore folkloric narratives with dramatic, sometimes violent themes. Her three featured pieces comprise "Sirens," influenced by the enchantresses of "The Odyssey" as well as fairy tales about mermaids and water witches. In Vasta's lush, contemporized triptych, which is meant to function as an installation and as individual stand-alones, a group of scantily clad women drag a screaming man wearing shirt and tie into a churning pool of water."I like to start with fairy tale archetypes - the virtuous woman, the evil witch, the hero, the fool - and play with them," says Vasta.The complex surfaces and visceral nature of the pieces may stem from the fact that Vasta works with glitter. "Glitter is physically captivating, dazzling and also looked down on for its femininity," she says. "I want the women in my work to be powerful and scary. ... But since I'm working with glitter, the subject matter has to have a bit of a hard edge to it, or else it slides into the saccharine and kitschy."In the Pyes' 11-minute 2008 film, "Loudly, Death Unties," the two play a couple holed up in a claustrophobic lodge who are troubled by the recurrent visitation of a banshee. The film is an extended metaphor about the man coming to terms with the death of his lover.Reception 7-9 tonight. Through Sept. 19. Noon-5 p.m. Tues.-Sat. San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, 401 Van Ness Ave., S.F. (415) 554-6080. www.sfacgallery.org.- Nirmala Nataraj, 96hours_sfchronicle.comRead more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/22/NSCF18QVED.DTL#ixzz1hwg17RSh

Art Ltd.

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Art Ltd.

young at art: 15 artists under 35Laura Richard JankuMay 2008When publisher Horace Greeley advised the youth of his era to “Go west ... ! And grow with the country!” he surely had other things on his mind than contemporary art. But these days, more than ever, young artists are coming west. If the West Coast has exploded as an art center since the 1990s, it is at least partly because its institutions have become such a prolific incubator for this new generation of aspiring talents. From schools like UCLA, CalArts, and CSULB in the L.A. region and SFAI and CCA in San Francisco, to homegrown collectives like SOIL in Seattle, to emerging artist awards like SFMOMA’s SECA in San Francisco, to museums like PAM in Portland, which sponsors the Contemporary Northwest Art Awards this summer, or OCMA in Orange County, which once again hosts its influential California Biennial this fall, the West Coast has become a veritable alphabet soup of youthful creative endeavor.Certainly, there is no age limit to the term “emerging artist.” Many top artists take years to establish a memorable voice, style, or approach, and even longer to refine it. It can be a lonely journey; the best emerging artists are often those whose have taken years to emerge. Yet there is a reason that so many gallerists stalk through MFA shows in search of new talent: young artists still in the process of discovering their own skills and inventing their own lexicon often attack their creative process with tremendous vigor and willingness to explore new terrain.In the following pages, art ltd. sets forth a special section, profiling 15 West Coast artists under the age of 35. A few, like Amanda Ross-Ho of Los Angeles or San Jose’s Binh Danh, have already received a fair share of attention, others are still working toward their first solo show. Some earned their chops as studio assistants for better-known mentors; all of them are still in the opening act of their careers. Call them “artists to watch,” “critic’s picks,” or what-have-you, they are artists who have already gained the eye of West Coast gallerists, curators, or collectors, and who we think deserve the attention. Not despite their relative youth, but because of it[. . . ]Jamie Vasta, San Francisco"As White As Snow"Glitter, Stain on Wood36" x 48"Photo: Courtesy of Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San FranciscoAll that glitters may not be gold, but Jamie Vasta has a definite Midas touch with a certain crafty material. With a brush of her fingertips, glitter is alchemized from carnivalesque into uncanny and classic figurative paintings. Vasta’s most recent works continue to upend Disney’s sanitized versions of myth and fairytale. With glitter as a powdery shorthand for magic that cuts both ways, she reinstates the original, darker fables where human nature is darker and messier and endings are usually not happy. In her current Witches series, Vasta has sharpened her focus from slightly macabre staged narrative scenes to renaissance-like portraits of powerful women. Timeless and beguiling, Vasta’s subjects radically revise the cartoons of haggard crones and evil sorceresses into archetypes of strength, whose nimbleness, beauty and enchantment are embodied by their glinting and mercurial materiality.Inspired by Buddhist sand mandalas and sequined voodoo flags, Vasta realized that glitter’s physical response to light achieved effects that even haloed oil paint could not. As an undergrad at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, many professors sniffed at her use of such a “low” material. Like the strong women she portrays, Vasta persisted: “I like having to create my own rules… working with a material that doesn’t have centuries of history to answer to. Glitter is wide open.” Fortunately, the MFA program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco (she graduated in 2006), afforded her the space and support to delve into its full potential.Exhaustive experimentation and a shift in subject matter resulted in her breakthrough Ecstatic Landscapes (2005) which echo the transcendence of nineteenth-century Romantic painting. Un/Natural Disasters (2006) complicated pure landscape with death and destruction—fire and storms lend themselves particularly well to glitter, as do the glowing parking lot lights in the Suburban Sublime works from 2006. With each new series, humans have stepped closer to the fore and Vasta has delved deeper into their psyche. In Arcadia (2006), people—by virtue of their small scale and casual activities—were visitors in the natural environment; in Musn’t (2007) they occupied center stage, engaged in slightly sinister rituals.Vasta’s process has also shifted to the more deterministic. Where she used to use found images as her sources, she now carefully choreographs and photographs performances for her paintings. She hires models and scouts secluded sites. On location, she dresses and directs the subjects into open-ended scenes that speak of archetypal characters and situations, and human nature. Back in the studio, Vasta edits, selects and crops the images that imagine a particular moment across myth and time. While the new Witches are less macabre than the earlier violent narrative threads she pulled from legend, the Bible, the Iliad, and Angela Carter’s feminist fairy tales, they are no less disarming or ambiguous. Framed by Vasta’s signature tangle of bare, stained branches, the witches’ formal poses and regal bearing establish that they are in control. The paintings’ shimmer of variegated color confirm that there is no black-and-white in this world, and the glitter in the witches’ eyes—along with ongoing art-world accolades—suggest that Vasta has indeed cast her spell.Jamie Vasta is represented by Patricia Sweetow Gallery, 77 Geary St., San Francisco, CA. (415) 788-5126 www.patriciasweetowgallery.com

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Art In America

April 2008Jamie Vasta at Patricia SweetowBy Melissa E. FeldmanImagine punked out Pre-Raphaelites up to no good and you have an idea of Jamie Vasta's meticulous paintings in acrylic and glitter on wood (aII 2007). Tangled branches of leafless trees marble the backgrounds of scenes dominated by monumental, classically posed sleepwalkers and stalkers, killers and their victims. Kin to Rossetti's and Burne-Jones's elaborately staged allegories of sex and death, with their statuesque brooding maidens, Vasta's ambiguous narratives are melancholy and disturbing despite all the glitter. In Scarcely a Leaf Left on a Tree, a woman kneels beside a handsome blue-eyed corpse, tenderly brushing his hair. Is she his lover, killer or both? Not only is she too old to play the part of the dewy maiden, but her hair-an asymmetrical boy-cut with red streaks-is all wrong for the period indicated by the painting's style. The woman who crawls on all fours across the foreground of Feral is shown in profile, her hairy wolf mask and sleeves, diaphanous white dressand heavy biker boots disjunctive enough to form a kind of corps exquis.Like her Victorian forebears, Vasta dresses up her models and photographs them for reference, updating the process by bringing out its collaborative aspect: the on-location interactions of the performers with whom she works take on a life of their own. Indeed, these paintings have the quality of film stills, of iconic moments found and frozen. Working fromphotographs also enables the artist to faithfully record every detail-the dappled violet sunlight falling through the branches onto a lace dress, pink-tipped fingers grasping a glistening dagger,the intricate underbrush-making the entire surface an embroidery of shining, overlapping patterns.The grain of the wooden supports keeps the decorative rhythm going across occasional gaps.

ArtWeek

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ArtWeek

JAMIE VASTA AT PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERYReviewed by DeWitt ChengIf we accept modernist dicta, art should be pure and abstract, and appeal to the eye. If we adopt postmodernism's analytical mindset, art should appeal to the wary, ingenious mind seekingfortification against the blandishments of an ideologically corrupt reality. For some, the extreme choices of optical hedonism and puritanical skepticism are equally disembodied and incomplete.Bruno Bettelheim, the psychologist who championed the reading of fairy tales by children as preparation for life, said, "We must live by fictions-not just to find meaning in life but to make it bearable." Jamie Vasta, a young painter, wants us to be less decorous and safe; she wants to restore physicality and emotionality to art - to shake us up a bit. Her improbable weapons: glitter, that lowly, kid's craft medium, and, equally unlikely, the fairy tale. These are not Disney cartoons of maidenly virtue, male valor and twittering, chirrupy animals, but something darker, funnier and more subversive: the mordant, R-rated, feminist tales of the English writer Angela Carter, with their echoes of Poe, Baudelaire, the Grimms and Sade. Vasta, who admires Carter's tales, creates visual analogues for them: "In Mustn't, the fair maidens of fairy tale, seemingly as delicate and precious as glitter, play out unexpected roles in which they are super-human and predatory...I use the shiny and sinister allure of glitter to entrap you in the story... Color is an intoxicant... To dazzle is to have power." The very title Mustn't bespeaks the lure of the forbidden- which will prove, inevitably, overpowering.Despite the magpie allure of her sparkling surfaces, Vasta's subject matter derives from straight photography or rather from cinema, or a simulation of it, like Cindy Sherman's faux film stills.Vasta photographs three young actors, two women and a man, as they improvise scenes in apparently cold northern woods and thickets, which, rendered in flattish, abstract patterns, seem obstinately indifferent to the dire human dramas played out amid their enveloping tendrils. The actor' implied scenarios tend toward the nightmarish and nefarious, and the viewer, perhaps flashing on scenes from Blair Witch Project, The Village and Evil Dead, struggles to construct a coherent narrative-but in vain. There is no fixed order to the paintings (as far as I know), and what appears to be the sacrifice or execution of the man in In the Rushes (with its echoes of Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith Beheading Holofernes and Goya's Ya van desplumados) is preceeded and succeeded by images of: the man stalking one of the women through the forest (Will o' the Wisp); the binding with red cloth of one of the women by the other (Stepsisters); the brandishing of the sacrificial weapon (The Knife); the victim's offering of vegetables on a platter(The Beseecher); the imminent gutting of a rabbit (Cottontail); the brushing of the man's hair as he lies stunned or dead (Scarcely a Leaf on the Tree); one of the women striding purposefully amid the trees (As White As Snow); and the other woman crawling alongside a stream wearing a lace dress, heavy boots, a bird mask and furry sleeves (Feral). This cinematic jump-cutting in time is as unsettling as the seeming impassivity of the women. We are denied even the pleasure or closure of terror and catharsis; trapped inside the film loop, we're forced to replay and relive the incidents. Curiously, the laboriously applied glitter, redolent of movie screen and mosaic, somehow amplifies the effect rather than diminishing it.What's new about these paintings is their scintillating, hypnotic look, and the subject matter is so old as to be new again. Students of classical mythology (and art history) will recognize her the hideous punishments meted out to unlucky huntsmen who stumbled upon bacchantes or goddesses: Actaeon, for example, glimpsed Diana bathing and was transformed into a stag to be devoured by his own hounds. In Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture, Bram Dijkstra refers to these dangerous wild women in nineteenth-century art as "poison flowers" ad "maenads of decadence." Their return of the temptress/femme fatale may, ironically, be away of shaking us from our cozy detached artistic decadence-of restoring Vasta's desiderata of "enchantment, rhapsody, ecstasy, psychosis, and terror." If the price of restoring primal feeling to art is a reversion to and updating of the timeworn pagan legends that most artists abandoned long ago, well, we should remember that recent performance art too flirtedwith danger and taboo. Are we as rational as we pretend to be? Life, as Cezanne mutteredcontinually, is terrifying; art, through through aesthetic/therapeutic distancing, makes it bearable,mostly.

SFBG 2007

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San Francisco Bay Guardian

November 21, 2007Dark sparkle: Jamie Vasta's art glittersBy Johnny Ray HustonSparkle, San Francisco, sparkle — the Bay Area is a birthplace for visions of glitter. The Cockettes weren't averse to throwing a few antique trunks full of metallic iridescence over their song and dance routines, and the late Jerome Caja mixed glitter with nail polish and liquid eyeliner to create a bad-acid cartoon Maybelline version of Hieronymus Bosch interpreting Dante. Jamie Vasta's use of glitter isn't as campy as the Cockettes' or as lurid as Caja's, but it's on its way to becoming just as distinctive. Vasta doesn't merely sprinkle glitter; with a devotion that's both painterly and sculptural, she allows it to form and dominate her images."Mustn't," a show of new glitter- and stain-on-wood works by Vasta at Patricia Sweetow Gallery, proves that while her vision of gender isn't as palsied and perverse as Caja's, it's still subversive. The nine works on display present unified glimpses of a forested world where a man is seduced and either tortured or murdered by a pair of sisters. Vasta has mentioned Angela Carter's fairy-tale revisions when discussing these images, in which femininity is alluring and dominant.Working from photographs of a trio of professional actors, Vasta creates a claustrophobic, thicketed world where the women's gestures of affection toward each other can also be seen as vicious struggle and where a man might be dead or in thrall to a degree that will soon prove fatal. In terms of technique and approach, wood, not glitter, is Vasta's secret weapon. These works on wood are usually set in a forest, and while Vasta sometimes uses the backdrop in a literal sense to represent branches, she'll justas often rely on stained sections to represent sunny untamed fields. Nature and artifice are at play in works such as Cottontail, in which one of the sisters, skinning a rabbit, wears a skirt printed with proudlooking deer that are almost of a piece with the surrounding landscape.While Vasta's devotion to glitter is steadfast, "Mustn't" marks a shift in subject matter away from the contemporary landscapes of her past work into a more mythic and at times precious realm, where psychology is more to the fore and references to Judith and Holofernes crop up in an elliptical fashion. As Vasta's wholly individual command of glitter's illusory qualities and depth — as well as its tendency to blur boundaries — has increased, her color schemes have come to flirt more with purples and violets. The thought occurs that she's more comfortable using hues that would set off kitsch alarms if employed by a lesser artist. The one quality that connects the fantasy-based works of "Mustn't" with Vasta's past images of house fires, mysterious blue lights, and tornadoes is a violent air. One gets the feeling that thisshow is just the beginning of a longer journey through a variety of unsettling zones.

SF Weekly

June 14, 2006The Art of the Back StoryBy Hiya SwanhuyserAs you look at the art in "Peripheries of Narrative," give yourself a little extra time. Stop in frontof each piece and take a slow breath. As your eyes become accustomed to the basic facts of the works — a ship, glitter, string — you'll be rewarded for your patience with little pops of recognition. Guest curator Kim Anno apparently cherry-picked some of the best work from the recent graduates of California College of the Arts' MFA program and put it into a show with a tricky sort of cohesion: All the contributors create artwork with a hidden-in-plain-sight quality. Katie Lewis' pins and strings stand out; as you contemplate the reddish resin she's hand-applied to thousands of pinheads, subtle shadows appear, and you realize that those shadings change with the sun. Jamie Vasta's glittering canvases look like a collaboration between Monet and Liberace, and the surprise is the different textures the artist gets from the sparkling bits, as if she'd placed each flake into a specific planar relationship with its neighbors. And it doesn't require any calm at all to appreciate Michele Carlson's crazy-quilt galleons and billows, since they're huge and dramatic but somehow also wistful; you could be jumping up and down and not miss out. But take that extra minute and you could spy the heaps of tiny, identical dolls inhabiting thedeck of the boat. Susan Chen and Weston Teruya also contribute.

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Revista Zena

Glitter, cola e contos de fadas: um mundo de Jamie Vasta“Bárbara, dá uma olhada no trabalho de Jamie Vasta! Ela faz altas coisas legais com glitter e cola. Tenta fazer uma entrevista com ela”. Foi esse o e-mail que recebi da Revista Zena. Glitter e cola? Imaginei logo umas figuras meio abstratas, meio brilhantes – bonitas até -, mas um pouco desfiguradas, afinal o glitter deveria ser um material difícil de manejar.Por Bárbara Buril // segunda-feira, 14 de junho de 2010“Bárbara, dá uma olhada no trabalho de Jamie Vasta! Ela faz altas coisas legais com glitter e cola. Tenta fazer uma entrevista com ela”. Foi esse o e-mail que recebi da Revista Zena. Glitter e cola? Imaginei logo umas figuras meio abstratas, meio brilhantes – bonitas até -, mas um pouco desfiguradas, afinal o glitter deveria ser um material difícil de manejar. Coloquei no Google: “J-a-m-i-e V-a-s-t-a”. Plim! Uma enxurrada de informações, vídeos no Youtube, imagens, sites de galerias de arte… Até que essa artista faz sucesso! As imagens, as imagens, cadê? Cadê o glitter das figuras abstratas?Enganada, eu estava. Diferentemente de muitos artistas contemporâneos, Jamie não decidiu usar um novo material, o glitter, apenas para “inovar”. O trabalho é elaborado, tanto que, à primeira vista, pensei: “Quem foi que disse que isso é feito de glitter? Isso é pintura a óleo!”. Só com muito talento, além de treinamento, é claro, Jamie conseguiu imprimir – com glitter, assustem-se! – sombra e perspectiva. O resultado é uma arte madura, agradável aos olhos e, principalmente, questionadora. A profundidade temática está ali, dentro da profusão de brilhos do glitter, um “espelho colorido”, como a própria artista definiu.Muito simpática, Jamie me concedeu uma pequena entrevista: falou da constante presença feminina nas suas obras, questionou as ideias binárias de gênero e defendeu um modo de vida mais libertário, longe dos ditames que insistem em reger o comportamento das pessoas. Como uma alma rara, agradeceu o meu interesse em seu trabalho. “Não, Jamie, o encanto não veio de dentro pra fora, mas, sim, de fora pra dentro”, pensei.O papo segue abaixo.Revista Zena – Jamie, seu trabalho é muito diferente, uma vez que é feito de cola e glitter. Como você se inspirou para trabalhar com estes tipos de material?Meu treinamento é com pintura a óleo, mas eu sempre estive interessada em materiais alternativos, orientados para algo mais artesanal. O glitter me lembra uma certa feminilidade. É um artesanato barato, mas dono de glamour e teatralidade. Mas como uma superfície, o glitter também tem um alto nível de atividade, uma qualidade transcendental que me lembra um espelho colorido. Eu comecei a trabalhar com este material quando eu era somente uma estudante de artes plásticas – depois de me tornar alérgica à toxicidade da tinta a óleo. Depois disso, comecei a tentar usar outros materiais que não me deixassem doente. Tentei vários – bordado, crochê, mas rapidamente comecei a gravitar em direção ao glitter, e, hoje, trabalho com isso já faz mais de dez anos.Revista Zena – Assim como artistas contemporâneos, você procura o novo conceito de criação de arte através do uso de novas ferramentas. Para você, há algo muito positivo ou negativo nestes novos usos?Creio que, na arte contemporânea, as regras estão amplamente abertas. Você pode fazer arte de qualquer forma. Eu amo isso. Penso que esta possibilidade oferece ao artista o senso do mágico no mundano – se você pode fazer arte com qualquer material e assunto da vida cotidiana, você pode começar a ver arte em todos os lugares, em tudo o que você fizer. Apesar disso, eu também amo e admiro a pintura tradicional. Acho que é importante ter os dois – carregar as linhagens da arte que vieram antes de você, e o bom gosto de jogar e inventar algo novo.Revista Zena – As personagens das suas pinturas são representadas em uma atmosfera muito pesada. Por que isso?Há muitos anos atrás eu comecei o que eu acredito que seja o meu trabalho atual, pintando exclusivamente paisagens. Eu tinha acabado de me mudar da Califórnia para a costa leste dos Estados Unidos e fiquei realmente apaixonada pelas paisagens aqui – a natureza é muito mais grandiosa e dramática do que a do local onde eu cresci. Gradualmente, meu trabalho deslocou as paisagens de personagem principal para o cenário de narrativas. O trabalho que faço atualmente é primordialmente inspirado em conto de fadas, que normalmente estão situados em uma paisagem pré-moderna – escura, composta por florestas tenebrosas ou pequenas vilas agrícolas, mas raramente cidades. Eu gosto de colocar meus personagens neste viçoso e feroz ambiente porque eles situam a história fora de um tempo específico e a coloca dentro de um arquétipo.Revista Zena – Quem são as duas mulheres que você pintou na série de quadros mustn’t? Finalmente, elas se amam ou se odeiam?Para as peças desta série, eu imaginei uma história sobre um jovem, em aventura, que encontra duas donzelas sobrenaturais na floresta – um começo bastante comum em conto de fadas. O que há de diferente é que eu desloquei o ponto de vista do homem para o das mulheres, transformando-o, ao contrário do herói tradicional dos contos de fadas, em um intruso indesejável no mundo das mulheres. As duas, como eu as imaginava, são volúveis, predadoras, possivelmente irmãs incestuosas, fechadas em suas próprias lutas, suas próprias histórias, interrompidas pela aparição do caçador mortal. Mas eu também queria deixar as peças abertas o suficiente para que os observadores pudessem criar suas próprias histórias, não menos válidas que as minhas. Desta forma, se cada um der uma interpretação própria, as peças podem ser independentes umas das outras, sem necessitar da série inteira para ter um sentido total.Revista Zena – Como mulher, você acredita que as suas pinturas quebraram a antiga ideia de que as mulheres têm que ser um templo de amor?As mulheres, nas minhas pinturas, são sempre as únicas com poder. Embora elas sejam bonitas, são também as jogadoras ativas no drama da pintura – não estão esperando passivamente para serem observadas. Como uma mulher e uma feminista, eu rejeito as ideias binárias de gênero e o pensamento de que nós devemos estar fechados dentro de regras de como deveríamos nos portar ou interagir uns com os outros. Mas, como uma contadora de histórias, eu sempre dou foco às mulheres más, àquelas que são poderosas e agressivas, às sereias que afundam navios e às feiticeiras que transformam príncipes em sapos.Revista Zena – Seu trabalho nos lembra os sonhos da Disney e, depois, os problemas da sociedade contemporânea. Muito paradoxal?Eu gosto de começar com arquétipos familiares dos contos de fadas para, depois, ir em busca dos buracos que eles normalmente guardam, com o fim de criar novas histórias. Eu não acredito que há realmente um paradoxo nisso – a Disney usa estes arquétipos para nos contar algo da sociedade contemporânea, eu os utilizo para contar outras versões. No entanto, as histórias, nas minhas pinturas, não tendem para o final em que a princesa e o herói se casam e vivem felizes para sempre.Revista Zena – Se você pudesse mudar somente uma coisa no mundo, o que você mudaria?Eu faria com que todas as pessoas pudessem ter acesso aos recursos básicos que necessitam para viver.Revista Zena – Se você pudesse dizer uma coisa para todas as mulheres do mundo, o que você diria?Não deixe ninguém definir quem você é e o que você pode fazer.Mais sobre Jamie Vasta: www.jamievasta.com

Artillery
SFBG 2011
SF Examiner
SF Chronicle
Art Ltd.
Art In America
ArtWeek
SFBG 2007
SF Weekly
Revista Zena

Resume

JAMIE VASTAb. 1980 Rochester, NYEducation2006 MFA California College of the Arts, San Francisco2003 BFA School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston / Tufts University1998-99 Smith College, Northampton, MASolo and Two-Person Exhibitions:2011 After Caravaggio, Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco, CA2010 The Hunt, Skew Gallery, Calgary, Alberta, Canada2009 Conversation 5, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, San Francisco,CA The Hunt, Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco, CA2007 MUSTN’T, Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco, CA2006 Jamie Vasta, The Rhys Gallery, Boston, MASelected Group Exhibitions2010 Secret Drawings, Palo Alto Art Center, Palo Alto, CAExploring Media: Glitter, University Art Gallery, Western Illinois University, Macomb, ILWinter Solstice, Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco, CAChimera: Fabrications of the Mind, Gensler Architecture, San Francisco, CA2009 From the Celestial Latitude of 45 degrees, Ending at Longitude 60 degrees, Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco, CAA Measure of Humanity, Grand Galleries, Tracy, CA2008 The Other Mainstream II, Arizona State University Museum, Tempe, AZ2007 Stop Pause Forward, Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco, CA2006 Peripheries of Narrative, Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco, CAAwesome: The Contemporary Sublime, Playspace, San Francisco, CAHush Hush, Café Royale, San Francisco, CA2005 Sleight of Hand, the Artist's Touch, Linc Art, San Francisco, CAImpersonature, artSPACE_16, Malden, MAOther Planes of There, Adobe Books, San Francisco, CA2004 Small Works, Artspace_16, Malden, MASFAI + CCA, Playspace, San Francisco, CABlurring Landscape, GASP, Brookline, MAArtist's Choice, Somerville Museum, Somerville, MA2003 All That Glitters, Islip Art Museum, East Islip, NYThe Burnt Orange Heresy, Space 101, Brooklyn, NYThe Factory Revealed, Cocheco Mill, Dover, NHBibliography;2011 Barbara Morris, Jamie Vasta at Patricia Sweetow, Artillery Magazine; JulyMatt Sussman, All That Glitters, San Francisco Bay Guardian;April 12 20112010 Barbara Buril, Glitter, cola e contos de fadas: um mundo de Jamie Vasta, Revista Zena: June 20102009 Patricia Maloney, Critic’s Picks, Artforum.com; September 2009Micaela Van Zwoli, Conversation 5 at the San Francisco Art Commission Gallery, San Francisco Examiner, July 24, 2009 Nirmala Nataraj, Conversation 5': Series of dual exhibitions combines complementary artists, one local, one from out-of-town, San Francisco Chronicle, July 23, 20092008 Laura Richard Janku, “YOUNG AT ART” 15 UNDER 35, art ltd. May (Cover Image)Melissa Feldman, Jamie Vasta at Patricia Sweetow Gallery, Art In America, AprilDeWitt Chang, Jamie Vasta at Patricia Sweetow Gallery, Artweek, February 2007 Alanna Spence. Jamie Vasta at Patricia Sweetow Gallery, Bay Area ArtQuake, December 3 Johnny Ray Huston, Dark sparkle: Jamie Vasta's art glitters, San Francisco Bay Guardian November 21Johnny Ray Huston, The Queer Issue: Flaming Creators, San Francisco Bay Guardian, June 202006 Glen Helfand, Critic’s Picks, Artforum.com; June 2006Amber Whiteside, 'Peripheries of Narrative' at Patricia Sweetow Gallery, Artweek, September 2006, p. 14Hiya Swanhuyser, The Art of the Back Story, SF Weekly, June 14Cate McQuaid, Galleries: Duct Tape and Glitter, Boston Globe, June 12005 Christian Holland, Impersonature_artSPACE_16, Big Red and Shiny - An Online Arts Journal for Boston: Issue 24, July.Kate Ledogar, Art at the Edge, Weekly Dig, June 29-July 5, p.25.2004 Helen Harrison, The Allure of Gold and Glitter, The New York Times: January 4, Section 14LI, p.6.Kate Ledogar, Tasty Little Numbers, Weekly Dig, December 1-8, p.26.Micah J. Malone, Blurring Landscape _ GASP, Big Red and Shiny, Issue 11, October.2003 Christopher Chalmers, September Picks, M/The New York Art World: September/October.Public CollectionsBerkeley Art Museum, CACrocker Art Museum, CA

Contact

Jamie Vasta

I am represented by the Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco. For professional inquiries, please contact the gallery at info_patriciasweetowgallery.com or (415) 788-5126

After Caravaggio

Sea Shanties

All works 2010

Sirens

Created for an exhibition at the San Francisco Arts Commssion Gallery in 2009

The Hunt

2008

Witches

2008

Mustn't

2007

Dark Woods

2006 - 2007

Master Page 1