Technarcissism Part I
24”x30”
Acrylic on canvas
2015
This painting is of a robot in his artist's studio. Two of his pieces are painted replicas of pieces I've made myself (Angel on my Shoulder and Create Outside the Box). This is a sister piece to Technarcissism Part A. With its sister piece, these works play with the perception between two and three-dimensional media.
Angel on my Shoulder
34”x44”
Acrylic on canvas
2014
Bound 2 be Kitsch
36”x48”
Acrylic on canvas
2014
Following the release of Kanye West's "Bound 2" song in 2014, I made a parody portrait of the rapper. I defined kitsch as art that is so terrible and cheesy that its pure audacity is actually enjoyable. This is also how I felt about Kanye West's new song "Bound 2" so I painted this portrait of him as a modern sort of kitsch.
Forgotten Souls
36”x60”
Acrylic on canvas
2016
This piece is a self portrait but also a more realistic portrayal of a yamask, which is a Pokémon. In the lore of the games, yamasks are ghosts of dead people and the mask that they carry is its face from when it was alive. It's pretty dark and creepy, especially for a children's game so I'm super into it. You can check out the process for making this piece .
Jeff Leavitt
Things I Wish Existed
Jeff Leavitt
Granted, 2016-2017
Canvas, wood, acrylic, polymer clay, LEDs, projection
The canvas is a three-dimensional object, not just a forgotten method of getting a painting into the world. It is an item that should be appreciated on its own, not just for how it brings a painting to life. The painting does not do all the work; the two work in symbiosis. The canvas can be a home to the paint, but it can also confine it. A poorly made canvas can distract from a piece as much as a huge spill of red paint right down the middle. The canvas is the beating heart of the piece and the paint is its skin, its personality, its substance. Aside from texture, a stretched painting is considered a work of two-dimensional art but the canvas on its wooden bones pulls it into three-dimensions and gives it new life.
To show the care and artistry that could go into something as forgotten as the canvas, I created the most complicated canvases I could think of. Since painting is often more emphasized than the canvas, I decided to reverse it and make the canvas the more significant role. How strange to think of the painting as the afterthought when in normal circumstances the canvas is not even consciously recognized. I like my work to have playfulness and character—to create some sort of suggested narrative when looked at. In this exhibition the paint is interacting with the otherwise emotionless canvases. This dichotomy of living and inanimate, simple and complex, emphasized and taken for granted, is what drew me to bringing this show into reality.