A Hug From The Art World is pleased to present ALL SMILES,
Bryan Jabs’ first New York solo exhibition.
The exhibition will open on Thursday, January 19th, with a reception from 6-8 PM, and be on view through Saturday, February 25th at 515 West 19th Street, New York, NY 10011.
Between 2018 and 2021, Bryan Jabs created ALL SMILES, a body of work made in a state of grief, while seeking to heal and dispose of the pain felt by the loss of a close friend. In the midst of being haunted by his own fictionalized images of his friend's tragic end and overcome by intense guilt, he began creating wall works of giant faces. Jabs created these faces as a means of separating the invasive frightening thoughts associated with this loss by fixing them into constructed faces. Using cardboard, fabric, and resin, the faces appear lumpy, and stretched, as if they are suffocating in their own tears. They are without lips, teeth, or ears, with gaping mouths held by woven metal chains, and although monstrous, they take on the shape of a smile. Despite being derived from pain, these faces present hope, humor, kindness, and an optimistic desire for happiness. Their eyes amicable, their expressions goofy. They are without memory, and even though their turmoil is sealed into their skin, they do not seem to know.
The freedom felt in the faces’ forgetful expressions became the optimism that fueled the creation of the work. Although originally uplifted by this new perspective, it became apparent that this healing came at a cost. As the ease of forgetting set in, so did the anxiety of the idea of losing one’s own memories. To address the problem, Jabs laboriously created giant birthday candles as monuments to his memory. In an absurdly elaborate process to accomplish the seemingly simple task of forgetting the bad and remembering the good, a massive 0 candle was constructed to mark a birth, and a smaller 31 candle to mark a death.
When viewed together, the faces and candles create a collision of events that pulsate between a birthday party, and a funeral. The audience becomes confused, unsure if they themselves are the subject or the viewer. Are they active in the moment, or are they passively walking through the scene like ghosts with the faces unaware of their existence? Precariously, the audience experiences the out of body phenomenon of being both alive and dying, as a witness and a subject to life's beginning and end.
Bryan Jabs was born in Hamilton, Bermuda in 1987, and was raised in Northern Virginia. He received his BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2010, and his MFA from Columbia University in 2016. Bryan currently lives, and works, in Brooklyn, New York, but the majority of the works in this show were created in Philadelphia between 2018 and 2022.