Jamie Fletcher

Snow Gallery is pleased to present Jamie Fletcher's first NYC solo show, Lonestar.

Jamie Fletcher is a Lone Star.

What makes fire burn so hot? What makes the flame shrivel which is burnt? What great force determines which substances become heavier and which become lighter when they burn? When a human being dies, the body becomes 21 grams lighter. The known alchemy of fireworks is but one explanation for the colors they make when exploded to smithereens.

"Face in the fire on the reptile house In the color and the carnage fall me down My face in the fire in the reptile house And the kissing and the color come crashing down"

—Sisters of Mercy, Burn

Metal, fireworks, hatred with endless cans of beer. I hate this place. There’s that Leon Russell song, Stranger in a strange land, where the plea to stop racing toward oblivion is gently asked... Hell no I won’t and fuck you for asking. I have no autonomy or rights to my body anywhere, least of all in Texas. What is sentimentality worth to you, then? Is endurance enough?

David Cronenberg’s speculum-obsessed exploration of female holes in Dead Ringers is close enough to the macerating disgust I feel for this body.

Men in gas stations perversely memorialized in bleach. Fighting flight, deep unease, rage. The dark planes of their paintings become pierced by the pink. The bleach eats away at the dark, leaving behind marks like cremains; like the ashes fallen from burnt effigies or spent M80s.

"Your god-child is my thirst so mad, a mouthless intimate hydra which consumes and ravages."

—Arthur Rimbaud, The Soul

Lonestar is a new presentation of paintings at Snow Gallery by Texas- born interdisciplinary artist Jamie Fletcher (b. 1986). Assemblage

sculptures masquerading as tiny altars, burnt figure paintings on linen made with fireworks, a huge truck tailgate pierced with bullets in the form of the artist’s own silhouette. In the 17th century, people believed that a mystical substance, a volatile substance that burns in the form of a flame, escaped from all burning materials. They called it phlogiston, from the Greek word for “burnt”. Texas is a potent source of petroleum, a crude oil. Fletcher’s choice of materials for their paintings are also crude oil- inky black and at the brink of combustion.

—Jools Rothblatt