Aitana de la Jara & Cara Jaye at ArtsWest Gallery
A two-person exhibition with work by Aitana de la Jara and Cara Jaye, Humming explores layered experiences of gesture.
Humming - October 2-November 15
Aitana de la Jara and Cara Jaye
ArtsWest Gallery
4711 California Ave SW | Seattle | artswest.org
Aitana de la Jara uses the skilled gestures of the game of pool as a metaphor and starting point for her paintings and drawings. Triangles, colored balls and visible remnants of swift movement all float in the ocean of the long, skinny pool cloth, functioning with dual meanings within the realm of abstract painting. The focused anticipation commanded by the pool table carries over to de la Jara’s paintings, as does the purposefulness of the marks and shapes. De la Jara writes: “The intensity of the practice and the gambling of the professional pool player can be a metaphor for the intensity and risk-taking of the artist, both working in obscurity and disregarded as engaging in a pointless activity, living a life at variance with mainstream social conventions, on the edge of economic subsistence.”
In her paintings (as in her life as a single mother), Cara Jaye incorporates, studies and works around the gestures of her five-year-old daughter. Sometimes starting a drawing her daughter adds to, sometimes basing drawings off of her daughter’s motivational charts and diagrams, the work is collaborative, in a sense. The child is a force to be marveled at, given space and responded to; the artist navigates a world that make sense with her daughter in it. Jaye writes: “I am interested in my daughter’s approach to constructing an image, her attempt to master or control something, (person or skill) as well as to my own feelings of inundation, along with a general sense of being overwhelmed.”