Snow Gallery is pleased to present Jamie Fletcher's first NYC solo show, LONEST✮R.
Jamie Fletcher is a Lone Star.
What makes fire burn so hot? What makes the flame shrivel which is burnt? What
great force determines which substances become heavier and which become lighter
when they burn? When a human being dies, the body becomes 21 grams lighter. The
known alchemy of fireworks is but one explanation for the colors they make when
exploded to smithereens.
Face in the fire on the reptile house
In the color and the carnage fall me down
My face in the fire in the reptile house
And the kissing and the color come crashing down
- Sisters of Mercy, Burn
Metal, fireworks, hatred with endless cans of beer. I hate this place. There’s that Leon
Russell song, Stranger in a strange land, where the plea to stop racing toward oblivion is
gently asked... Hell no I won’t and fuck you for asking. I have no autonomy or rights to
my body anywhere, least of all in Texas. What is sentimentality worth to you, then? Is
endurance enough?
David Cronenberg’s speculum-obsessed exploration of female holes in Dead Ringers
is close enough to the macerating disgust I feel for this body.
Men in gas stations perversely memorialized in bleach. Fighting flight, deep unease,
rage. The dark planes of their paintings become pierced by the pink. The bleach eats
away at the dark, leaving behind marks like cremains; like the ashes fallen from burnt
effigies or spent M80s.
Your god-child is my thirst so mad,
a mouthless intimate hydra
which consumes and ravages.
- Arthur Rimbaud, The Soul
LONEST✮R is a new presentation of paintings at Snow Gallery by Texas-
born interdisciplinary artist Jamie Fletcher (b. 1986). Assemblage
sculptures masquerading as tiny altars, burnt figure paintings on linen made with
fireworks, a huge truck tailgate pierced with bullets in the form of the artist’s
own silhouette. In the 17th century, people believed that a mystical substance, a volatile
substance that burns in the form of a flame, escaped from all burning materials. They
called it phlogiston, from the Greek word for “burnt”. Texas is a potent source of
petroleum, a crude oil. Fletcher’s choice of materials for their paintings are also crude
oil- inky black and at the brink of combustion.
Text by Jools Rothblatt