Jared Small

ARTIST STATEMENT 

​

​Small explores relationships between beauty in nature and structure, perfection juxtaposed to the haunting appeal of gentle decay and the impermanence of memory. The flora and architecture featured conjure the imagination, stirring memories unique to the viewer’s personal experiences. The home may feel bizarrely familiar, as if the viewer has passed it many times. The flora becomes mysterious artifacts symbolizing seasons, death, and rebirth cycles. Small seeks to demonstrate how memory is often incomplete. Memory can be more about the truth in a feeling than the facts of a form. The subjects of his painting are highly detailed, produced with meticulous precision, resulting in near-photorealistic flower petals, brick, chipped plaster, and the human form. Where the subject meets the background, realistic edges dissolve into a translucent, haunting abstraction,
as if crossing into another realm. Small’s use of abrupt smears, drips, and selective omissions enables the viewer to focus solely on the subject, the germane. Memory tends to be fragmented similarly. The viewer can recall some aspects of a memory with great detail and emotion, but outside that perfect realm, the details become like an apparition, fading into nothingness.

​

ARTIST BIO

​

Since childhood, Jared Small has been captivated by the beauty of gentle decay in his surroundings. He sees the structure of the Victorian home, aging amidst the warm, lush vegetation of Memphis, Tennessee, and the Delta regio,n serve as a portal into layered narratives of the past. Painting from photographs and his imagination, a sense of magical realism envelopes his compositions of homes, old structures, flowers, and portraits. These subjects become mysterious artifacts symbolizing the cycles of seasons, death, and rebirth. His surfaces are sometimes brilliant, glossy, almost glamorous - a marked but pleasing contrast to the peeling paint, sagging rooflines, broken windows, and wilting petals of age and dilapidation. Where the subject meets the background, realistic edges dissolve into a translucent, haunting abstraction, as if crossing into another realm. At times, he opts for surfaces that are aesthetically velvety and ethereal, allowing him to fully explore the use of negative space while training the viewer’s eye on the subject. The viewer is lulled into a dream-like state, caught between the realities of the obvious image and the histories, memories, and possibilities that lie beneath the surface.

Jared Small is a native of Memphis, Tennessee. He attended Overton High School and the University of Memphis, and has participated in numerous exhibitions in Tennessee, as well as a major solo exhibition at the Huntsville Museum of Art. His work is in the collections of the Butler Snow Law Firm, Memphis; Commercial Bank and Trust, Memphis; Double H Farms, CT; Duke
Aesthetic Center, Durham NC; Duncan Williams Inc, Memphis; First Bank, Nashville; Fidelity Investments, Raleigh, NC; HLM Venture Capital, San Francisco; Huntsville Museum of Art, Huntsville, AL: Jones Clinic, Memphis & New Albany MS; LeBonheur Children’s Hospital, Memphis; M2M, Mobile Mercer Capital, Memphis; Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis; Renasant Bank, Memphis; NSA Headquarters, Collierville, TN; Music City Center, Nashville; New Media Strategies, Arlington, VA; Pietrangelo Cook Law Firm, Memphis; Regions Insurance Headquarters, Memphis; St Mary’s Episcopal School, Memphis; and SunTrust Bank Memphis, Headquarters.