Statement

Jason's works challenges the boundaries of memory and perception in examining the human transitory
relationships to travel, landscape, and the passage of time. He uses drawing, photography, and installations to re-contextualize his own imagery and experiences. He reconstructs them in an imagined realm to question the meaning, perception and the subjectivity of looking. His work examines the postmodern experience of the tourist gaze and how the act of seeing perpetuates a romanticized view of the attraction calling into question
the nature of the authentic experience.

Working in series and sets he mines information and materials directly from his observations where he uses the landscape as a point of departure. To synthesize and preserve these experiences, a self-referential documentary process using news imagery, daily journals, photography, ephemera, and sci-fi imagery is used to form a subjective observation by which reality becomes more fictitious and the staged becomes more realistic. He re-imagines the subtle nuances of tourist destinations and regurgitates them as metaphysical signifiers. His work is a cataloging of his experiences, a kind of evidence in which the tourist and the documentarian are both looking for authentic experiences within the system of tourism and the history of photography.

 

Bio

Jason Wallengren is an American artist based in Nürnberg, Germany. He received his MFA from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University. He also studied Fine Art and Illustration at the Art Institute of Boston where he received his BFA. Prior to his move to Germany he completed a fellowship in New Zealand at New Pacific Studio in 2007. The residency culminated with a show at Aratoi Wairarapa Museum of Art & History in Masterton, New Zealand. Since 2005 he has been included in shows from Los Angeles, CA, to Boston, MA, to Nürnberg, Germany. While living in the U.S. he was creative director and founder of Mashtun Creative, a full service design agency. Jason has also done freelance illustration for various national clients. Over the past ten years he has developed a diverse body of work from documentary photo essays to branding campaigns to award-winning graphic designs.

His work, in whatever formal strategy it employs, challenges the boundaries of memory and perception in examining the human relationships to travel and landscape. His use of several mediums, including photography, drawing, and painting serve to create 2-D works as well as installations. At the core of his work is a documentary process that comes directly from his life-long interest in drawing and observing. His multi-layered imagery makes us aware of the complex relationships between subject, artist and spectator. The individual pieces are sometimes shown together to create a collection thereby emphasizing the body of work as an archive.