Jared Buckhiester: Fumbling Heart

March 23 – April 21, 2018

Curated by Doug Ischar

Jared Buckhiester: Fumbling Heart, curated by Doug Ischar, is a selection of the artist’s recent paintings, sculptures, and works on paper.

Four oil paintings show Dorothy’s windblown house, come to rest with finality in a variety of attitudes atop unfortunate cowboys, themselves depicted only as blue jeans and boots jutting out of the domestic rubble. Two figurative vessels – referring both to Moche ceramics and trucker’s long-haul piss-pots – are adorned with sculpted shoulder pads and jock straps. They are titled Urinal End and Urinal Guard. The drawings are a rogue’s gallery of cowpokes, parole violators, and vagrants. Together the works traffic in images of, quoting the curator, “Americana, men in homosexual acts, and a hint of the Midstate pastoral.” They are, “a bravely unglamorous look at the emotional refuse of American Life, or conversely, a fading echo of a once promissory gay erotica.”

Of the exhibition’s title, Buckheister notes: “My fascination is with the complexity of desire’s origin, and the ways in which it dictates behavior. I’m talking about an arousal template molded from the home interior and one’s own family unit, as well as from societal givens. For me the jewel is how this internal ‘carrot on a stick’ has the potential to complicate a moral compass, and I am most interested in this trouble. Not as a boy taking pleasure in being naughty, but as man baffled by his own fumbling heart.”