This contemporary artwork depicts a vibrant green landscape with a large, gnarled tree at the center. The composition features a variety of shapes and textures, with the tree's thick trunk and sprawling branches contrasting with the smooth, grassy foreground. The artist has used a muted, earthy color palette, highlighting the natural elements. Scattered throughout the scene are various gravestones and memorial markers, suggesting a symbolic exploration of themes like mortality, ancestry, and the cycle of life. The artist, J. Henry French, seems to have employed a folk art-inspired style, creating a whimsical yet poignant representation of the relationship between nature, memory, and the human experience. ...
Jessie Homer French’s small-scale landscape paintings combine realism and mysticism to create narrative scenes of life, death and nature. The self-taught artist depicts dark realities of life in rural California – fires, funerals, fault lines – in bright and saturated tones, appropriating a flattened perspective reminist of French Riviera postcards or American pastoral painting tradition. A self-proclaimed “regional narrative painter”, Homer French paints with bittersweetness through content and form. Almost obsessive over cemeteries and coyotes, disaster and decay, she observes and depicts the environment around her with transient, existential care. Only seemingly naive in the simplicity of her composition, the artist’s work is a gloomy exploration of what it means to be human and non-human, in a rapidly changing world.
Written by Goldsmiths CCA ...
Various Small Fires (Los Angeles /Dallas /Seoul) began as a series of conversations with artists and curators in Esther Kim Varet’s Venice Beach kitchen while working on her doctoral dissertation. VSF debuted in Hollywood as an official gallery in 2015 with a roster of artists and its current Johnston MarkLee Architects-designed building. The Hollywood gallery contains three exhibition spaces, a unique sound corridor, and an outdoor gallery. VSF’s exhibition program explores several curatorial lines: climate, equality, and an international conversation. The gallery is known for offering artists debut shows, creating intergenerational conversations among the artists on its roster, and solidifying artists’ legacies within art history. In 2019, VSF opened a second location in the Hannam neighbourhood of Seoul, South Korea, followed recently this Spring by VSFs third outpost in Dallas, Texas. While Varet has very personal connections to both locations, they are also superlative art communities. These expansions emphasise the gallery’s commitment to innovation and global dialogue in the twenty-first century. In 2021, VSF became a member of the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA). ...
