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
When you look at a two-dimensional image of a three-dimensional space, how does it alter the way you see the real thing? When taking a real object and placing it in a miniature space, does is stay the same size, or does it become gigantic? Does it matter how you view it?
The architecture of Things Between Walls is a 1/22 scale representation of Sage Art Center at the University of Rochester. I chose this space to dictate the walls of this show because it is the place that fosters my own creativity. Creative spaces are important to me and given that my background is not in architecture, I wanted the walls of my model to be those of a real place. Sage Art Center itself was once a dining hall. I’m attracted to the idea of taking an existing space and repurposing it into something completely different. What was once a kitchen was transformed into a wood shop, and is now a 1950’s style diner with creepy little clay people.
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The figures in the spaces serve both as a representation of scale, but also as much-needed inhabitants of this altered world. They provide a tone of whimsy and suggest a narrative; they are the personified feelings of the spaces in which they reside. Spaces take on a life of their own. The interactions that occur in this space are informed by the essence of the space itself, not the other way around.
By presenting absurd scenarios in garishly painted environments based on real architectural space, I aim to create a sense of the uncanny. The uncanny lies uncomfortably between dichotomous elements; it is somewhere on the spectrum between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Things Between Walls draws an awkward line between creepy and cute, large and small, fictional and replicated, unsettling yet satisfying.