Jared McGriff: On Being a Wild Dream

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present Miami-based artist Jared McGriff’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, “On Being a Wild Dream,” on view in the gallery’s Greenhouse space. McGriff’s expressionistic paintings conjure mundane moments and render them in ethereal brush strokes, transforming scenes of the every day into luminous and philosophical ruminations. McGriff’s paintings have previously focused on recounting his family history and are in this exhibition moving toward a broader narrative of the natural and structural environments that bodies navigate. McGriff’s interest in landscape painting and the figure extend to a metaphorical approach where his characters navigate between the laws of nature and the laws of man and the compromises we make between them.

McGriff describes his paintings as fiction about reality. Paintings such as “Measure My Diameter in Light Years” (2023) depict figures in landscapes that feel simultaneously specific and detached from a literal time and place. A woman carrying a vessel in a sunlit desert landscape becomes perhaps a metaphor for a caretaker of the future, and like the plant she carries, she is resilient in navigating a sparse environment. In another work entitled “Brother, This Garden Is For You” (2023) a smiling figure occupies a gloriously wooded area ripe with greenery–a scenery that suggests freedom from society's strictures in its borderless and untamed wildness.

While McGriff’s depictions of nature are joyful reclamations of it, other scenes refer to harsher realities of societal structures. In “A Constant Compromise, Fractional and Exponential” (2023) three judges are huddled together clutching their robes and dwarfed by the grandiose architectural space they occupy. Their amorphous forms look out at us with strange expressions evoking a sense of dread. Though united, as if in a defensive position, the figures appear both vulnerable and intimidating. In “Keeping My Brother on Ground Made Sacred the Hard Way” (2023) two figures in black puffer jackets walk side by side, the brush strokes of their puffer jackets interlacing them together, a visual aid to symbolize their connectedness. McGriff’s figures appear stoic and steadfast, firmly grounded in their earthly reality while claiming celestial realms, dreamily and stubbornly finding their way through their natural and built environments.