Colter Jacobsen

Acrylic and pencil drawings, installations and photographs of San Francisco-based artist Colter Jacobsen are intricate mosaics of recollections. His practice revolves around memories, ranging from depictions of his personal life to short texts explaining how his paintings came into being to the usage of found objects that were lost, given away or forgotten. The strategy of browsing the streets and looking for souvenirs of someone’s existence shows Jacobsen’s interest in the Bay Area “Mission School”, a movement that emerged in the late 1990s and celebrated the urban cluster of culture. Jacobsen began his practice by copying found postcards and photographs of joyful gay men squeezing into a diner booth or of over-exposed silhouettes amidst the summer trees onto old, distressed paper. Then, by making a copy of a copy and placing them next to each other, he demonstrates the ambivalence of the process of fading in both human memory and artistic process. Intricately powered by gay semiotics and narrative, Jacobsen’s art feels like having a friend with whom you can share everything.