Opening Reception: Jesse Amado: Heat and Time
October 19, 6:00 pm—8:00 pm
Jesse Amado: Heat and Time
opening reception: Saturday, October 19, 6-8 pm
on view: October 19–November 23, 2024
Felt may be the through-line material from Jesse Amado’s earliest 1980s work to his current explorations, but if so, it is the only baked-in component, other than his innate and boundless curiosity. He moves through an ever-changing array of found-anywhere-supplies because his purpose lies outside the lines of depiction, toward a process of combination, which reveals the surprises hidden within his creative processes.
This tendency to material bricolage, fugitive collection, is influenced by the diverse population of Amado’s home city, San Antonio, Texas, and his two-and-a-half decades as a fire fighter, when, every other forty-eight hours he repeatedly found the dynamic between waiting and sudden intense activity, a kind of weekly double dose of divergent experience, some of which was tragic and not known by many in other lines of work.
A new material appeared in his life during the pandemic: food delivery packaging, the white Styrofoam variety, which the artist accidentally discovered could be worked almost like clay in a kiln, by toying with time and temperature in his home oven. It is as if an alchemist’s athanor was installed in his kitchen such that he could conduct experiments in transformation, wasted material made beautiful, a foul thing become fair.
In his exhibition at kind of a small array, which continues through November 23, Amado frames some of these new material manipulations within the context of his work with cardboard, glass teardrop crystals, and felt, in some cases through two previous projects, 30 Day RX and Becoming, borrowing the pill-shape, a bifurcated circle meant to represent medication, a regimen he was exposed to while undergoing cancer treatment.
The artist refers to these materials that have entered his life, at times almost as alien interventions, as possessing “industrial character and capital.” His work with them is a kind of redemption.
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