A collection of oil paintings are being shown at the Juneau Arts and Culture Center. The exhibit is the result of two years of work by multimedia artist Jacob Higgins.
When Jacob Higgins’ show opened in early January, he aired it with music by Mozart.
“I want an art experience — a painting exhibit to feel relaxing, even if the painting themselves, the images, are not relaxed,” he said. “The person needs to be so they can take in what they are looking at.”
But for my tour, he recommends a song from the soundtrack of the movie “Birdman” called “The Anxious Battle for Sanity.” It opens with rolling jazz percussion, punctuated with crashing cymbals and abrupt silences.
An angry white clown smokes a cigarette on a patio with some bohemian Europeans in all black, an ox carcass hangs in a shed, wood pilings weather on a beach, a naked woman reclines on a bear — these are some of the 29 oil paintings in the gallery.
“As I’m creating an exhibit I want there to be a sense of–you move through chapters and you’re involved in a greater idea by the virtue of a collection of things put together,” he said.
His painting “Red Pears and Pork Hearts” is a good place to start.
“If you look at a still life of a basket, of a bowl of fruit, those things are actually on people’s tables. Pears and raw pork hearts leaning together — you don’t see that. And that’s where this elevates to an idea of a bit of the bounty and abundance, but also a bit of a tension, an attraction-aversion. And that piece, why I chose it for the show poster, was I feel like it really sums up the concept of the show overall,” said Higgins.
This is Higgins’ seventh solo show, and while he is a multimedia artist, all 29 paintings are in oil. Beyond bounty and abundance, Higgins’ work evokes something more visceral.
“One of the reasons people may find it grotesque to see flesh, meat, blood, those sorts of things, is because we all have an inherent sense of our vulnerability as humans. We are meat. The ideas of how we harvest meat, to eat it, the way the we maybe callously hang it from hooks in a butcher shop, and then we so delicately cook it at a restaurant, that’s a very interesting thing when you consider the fact that we also anthropomorphize something like a hanging meat or a cow head—we see ourselves a bit even in an animal that has died,” said Higgins.
The exhibit is a result of an academic study where Higgins explored different styles like still life, landscape, narrative painting — and it shows as you move around the gallery. Next to “Red Pears and Pork Hearts” is a landscape of Southeast, seemingly without any symbolic images.
“Fly” is a 3-by-4-foot piece with a beach scene of a building-size fly on it. Spawning salmon spew out of its gut.
Down the wall is a piece called “Three Hands” that explores human volatility. Among other interpretations, the hands, which are gloved with hospital scrub-like sleeves, allude to surgery–when we are most vulnerable. While they are trying to help, they may hurt, like the sting of a yellow jacket.
Higgins is taking chances with his work.
“You cannot create something new without having it sort of rub people the wrong way — some people. And you have to, just sort of be OK with that, you have to be at peace with the fact that you’re not gonna please everybody, and if you do, if you try to please everybody, you’re going to be greatly disappointed because it just does not work that way,” said Higgins.
Whether people like his work or not, Higgins is proud of it.
“As far as I am concerned, my artwork does not look like any other artwork I’ve seen. It has elements of other artwork. It has elements of Southeast Alaskan painting, it has elements of art history, some of my work even has elements of pop culture, but I feel that it’s truly my own voice,” said Higgins.
It would be impossible to sum up all of Higgins work in a short radio piece. Check out his work yourself. It will be up through the weekend in the JACC gallery.
