VIDEO WALKTHROUGH
Futurescape showcases a series of wall-based assemblages, prints and videos in the artist's signature style of cornucopic abundance. The works exist in states of growth, conjuring up waterfall dynamics and alluring glittering affects. Functioning as curious, cumulative objects, the works invoke alien landscapes and fictitious worlds. Operating specifically within the realm of landscape - merging the ideas of 'landscape', 'world', and 'object' - the works explore aesthetic projections of future environments.
Watch an excerpt from Jacob's new 4k video 'Futurescapes 2021', edition of 5. The full length video is available for purchase. It is 51.05 minutes duration.
Catalogue Essay by Andrew Harper 2021
English writer JG Ballard wrote of a crystal world: a landscape undergoing a beguiling and rapid transformation to an alien state of being. The process of crystallization swamps anything and everything with increasing rapidity: trees, animals, all are overtaken by a glittering sheen of terrible beauty. A snake, echoing the one in Eden, is blinded, its eyes covered in a crystal hood. You can feed meaning into a lot of things; go right ahead. Be warned though: seeking for meaning is a strange activity. People do that with art. They ask what it means, and sometimes there is an explanation. That’s a problem. Potential gets shut down. Definitive meaning might be the death of interpretation, locking an artwork on the narrowest of trajectories. It’s doubly problematic when an artwork describes a potential arc for a future; for at this moment, despite what anyone might hope for, the future is unwritten. The landfill of history is filled with inaccurate predictions and redundant narratives. Mulched and absorbed; compost for new acts of creativity.
A differing strategy dives into the ineffable spread of possible worlds. When each glittering shard sits in an expanded juxtaposition of the potency of poetic resonance: when meaning cascades from the work, unexhausted, context exploding with each viewing. What Jacob Leary gestures towards here is not potential but potentials: an archive of possible futures, all informing one another: it is possible disaster will occur and life will continue, altered but existent. Hope deformed arising true and terrifying, bringing transformation. Perhaps the Apocalypse is exactly what we need. The strange power of art and literature is that it may take us on voyages to unmapped spaces, imagining potentials that can only be accessed through the autopsy of fiction. Perhaps what we see here are maps and extrapolations from maps, a psychic, more fluid take on google earth’s mediated vision of reality. American author Jeff VanderMeer wrote of another fictional space: Area X[1]. There is greater density to VanderMeer’s transformed space than Ballard’s, but they are similar investigations of a complex concept. An alien landscape that will attract explorers, leaking out a near-hypnotic call that asks you to come, that draws you into a space of transformation. It is dangerous but there is terrible, gleaming wonder. Jacob’s glittering worlds of surfaces and potentials do not exist. The lands he sees are created from a selection of decisions. They are maps that come into being through intuition and suggestion. Jacob gathers the materials. They sing back at him, the creative actions guided outward to become drifts of imagery that recall the contours of place.
Peer into a new reality of suggested but not defined place-ness. It’s the same conceptual territory of fiction as a choose your own adventure book written by Philip K Dick but there are no page numbers, no dice, no guidelines, only the subconscious weaving of now into the shape of things to come. Meaning exists as a reflection, and the material itself does distort a perception of light. Grasp the flickering oracle.
[1] VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy: filmed as Annihilation.
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Jacob Leary completed his Masters of Fine Arts at the Hobart School of Art, undertaking research exploring the exponential growth of technology within contemporary culture. He has been invited to participate in a range of high profile exhibitions and initiatives including Hobart Current: Liberty 2020, in conjunction with the City of Hobart and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, the QANTAS Curates Initiative in 2017, which saw his works featured on the airline’s international Business Class amenity kits, exhibitied at DarkMofo in 2016 in conjunction with the Tasmanian College of the Arts and also exhibited at the Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery in 2013, as part of their Emerging Artists Program.
He has won numerous awards and grants including the John Fries Memorial Prize (2012), the Contemporary Art Tasmania Studio Grant (2012) and an Australia Council Grant for Emerging Artists (2013). He has been a finalist in the Glover Prize (2018), the Hutchins Art Prize, Works on Paper (2018), the Redlands Art Prize (2016), and the City of Hobart Prize for Printmaking (2014). He has undertaken commissions for Hobart College, MONA FOMA and the Moonah Arts Centre.
Jacob is currently a seasonal staff member at the Hobart School of Art and is undertaking a PHD at the University of Tasmania. His work is held in the collections of Artbank, University of Tasmania, Justin Art House Museum, RACT Collection, Tasmanian Government, llisington Collection and Ormond College.
