Speaking about her work to a roomful of Art History and Art majors, professors and interested students on a recent Thursday afternoon, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Art at Yale University, Jessica Tam started with a confession: “I get bored,” she said.
“Befriending [her] boredom” is a major impetus of her work, and the exhibition High Reps/Low Sets, on view in Cummings through December 5, shows some of the results of that friendship.
As the title suggests, some of the works in the show depict athletic endeavors. “Launch,” a series of ten images, only four of which are on display, is the result of a friend bringing the artist to boxing matches. She started the paintings “to entertain [herself],” wondering, “How can I take something that [is] unfamiliar to me and … make it more familiar?”
Because the wrestling works are not “celebratory fan art” for her, they raise a major question about an artist’s relationship to her art: What kind of work is expected of a given artist? Tam doesn’t think that people would expect her to depict wrestling in her art. But does an artist have the right to discuss a topic that she isn’t connected to, as Tam chooses to do with “Launch?” The series seems to suggest that, yes, artists do have the right to try and understand topics that they aren’t connected to; Tam uses oil paint to understand wrestling.
Seeking to understand topics in a different medium than that through which they are typically expressed raised several questions for the viewer – and for the artist.
“My work,” Tam said, “has … been driven by questions.”
How can an event, such as wrestling, be expressed in a different medium? What changes in the depiction of an event as the medium changes? What can the use of a variety of media to express the same event tell us about that event? What can it tell us about ourselves as the viewer of one medium but not necessarily another? What might we notice about wrestling from a painting that we might not when watching a match?
For Tam, “wrestlers were … transforming themselves into art” as she watched, and possessed an acrobatic beauty. As part of the research for the multiple wrestling series she has completed (only “Launch” is on view, unfortunately), she studied ancient arenas in Italy. There, she realized that the wrestling ring is a stage, with accompanying pathos and humanity.
But not all of the works on display take their inspiration from athletics. Instead, they take it from the “high reps” part of the exhibition’s title. “PIN NIP” is a series of fifty-five monotypes, all of which are on display in Gallery 66. The prints, which the artist made continuously until she was bored, have forms “caught in between states” that are outlined in white and set off by a blue, yellow or black background. They are mutating, existing on the edges of states, on the verge of becoming something else – despite the fidelity to the original that the process of copying supposedly maintains.
“Periscope Perioscope” is a series of twenty ink and paper drawings (eighteen are on view). Each is the same Grim Reaper-type figure, but some of the figures are shaded and some are not; some of the backgrounds as well are shaded, while others are not.
In both series, the similarities among the individual works connect them, creating the series the artist considers them to be. But they’re not the same. They are repetitive; Tam’s work is often self-referential, but how similar is repetition? Though the works at first appear so repetitive that they may strike the viewer as boring, in fact, each difference among them is all the more striking because the pieces are so similar; something that is repetitive can actually have a significant amount of individuality and depth.
Even the exhibition’s color scheme reinforces the focus on emphasizing the similarities and differences apparent in repetition. The scheme of the pieces, when taken together, creates an overall darkness. This occurs despite the fact that the scheme is different between works: blue, red and yellow in one series; black and white in another.
The very hanging of the works, down to the paper that makes up “Periscope Perioscope,” also forwards the goal of emphasizing connections and disconnects: everything protrudes from the walls, connecting the art to the space that it’s in. A few of the works are in picture frames, while others, the canvas and panel works, were first attached to a wooden frame before being hung. The repeated effect is a reminder that the pieces exist in space and are not two-dimensional, despite the fact that the media Tam chooses are.
