Jasper Spicero

Kaje is pleased to announce our first Season – Celebration For Simple, a solo presentation of Jasper Spicero’s automated sculpture, wall-mounted works, and the virtual release of accompanying sound, and text.

To set conceptual grounds for an exhibition, Spicero begins with audio. Digitally composed songs serve to initiate tone; which, when listened to repeatedly, enhances the shape of Spicero’s vision for a project, and further generation of written screenplay material. The dynamic scenes imagined within the texts provide a pluralization of pathways available for these songs> tone> characters> attitudes> and dialog> to travel.

Choosing to hone the evolution of any single form does not constrain the force of alternate influences bearing upon its condition. Inspired by the complex lore of Japanese gaming environments, information is intensely layered. Adopted as a logic, such compulsive obscuration oddly results in a release from the restraints of chronology, or basis in gravitation order.

The ultimate realization of Celebration For Simple is a circumstance of sculpture within our exhibition gallery, physically sharing space with individuals who enter. Patient monitors head three stations within the gallery. Stainless steel garbage cans stand at their bases, etched with gashes that also read like crude marks of communication. Each patient monitor has a slight personality.

Over the course of a day, the monitors light up and perform brief songs, independently and in unison. The spirit of the songs are uplifting, like chimes that greet the user of a new washing machine. All aspects of the work are recognizable but reprogrammed. The sense of emotionally intelligent appliances becomes comical.

A deer prances across the display screen of one monitor. The same pictographic deer–here bleeding, is assembled in loose Hama beads and bolted behind clear acrylic glass. Materially, these works also hover in an indiscernible spacetime location, their origins familiar but actually unplaceable. Cut shapes are slotted together to assemble the form of a small creature on another wall. Its gesture is friendly, yet again, languageless.

Spicero’s screenplays will be published virtually in waves over the course of the season, and into 2022.