JACOB LITTLEJOHN

Seeing the forest through the trees

Artist Reception: November 14th, 6-8 PM

November 14th - December 16th, 2023

Rivulets of color mark metronomic improvisations in Jacob Littlejohn’s exhibition “Seeing The Forrest Through The Trees.” The show title suggests a commonality - a sameness in their difference - with each new painting. The phrase also opposes a hierarchal bias towards the foreground, a reverence for the chorus over any one particular aria. Connecting notions of time, the cosmological and the contradictory, Littlejohn draws from the novel “Mr Palomar” by Italo Calvino: “We can know nothing about what is outside us if we overlook ourselves….The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves.” Or to paraphrase from Albert Oehlen, we paint from our body to the wall, that is the direction we see.

Littlejohn is citing old manuscripts of comet showers here while exploring contemporary phenomenon like perpetual twilight. “Paintings are informed by the momentary sublime rooted in the vastness of the natural world,” explains the artist. His compositions borrow from the enigmatic in the hope of touching on the supernatural. It takes something as atypical as a geomagnetic storm to remind us that stars are not beyond our reach, depth is an illusion as much as gravity steers us toward a ground-up perspective. A starling murmuration and a constellation map are both veins of the same tributary.