Jamie Fletcher

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

Jamie Fletcher is a Lone Star. Trapped, gunfire every night

She listens to harsh music. She builds fires. She pops off fireworks. She shoots guns. She rides a dirtbike. She does all the stuff that frightens her. She likes to rage.

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. This body-stuck feeling is as close to oblivion as I wanna get. I hate the idea of fucking as much as I hate the idea of getting raped. 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 this macerating disgust I feel for this body. This meat of mine is the wrong kind. Aging is a horror of its own; diminished sex drive, the growing feeling of unease inside and god-forbid outside. See, animal viscera is more approachable. Dead and rigid and hardcore, mutilated into divine altars assembled from a personal collection of ephemera and a variety of stand-ins for The Figure. Again, this fucking space is taken up by this meat that slowly rots. Rituals have their own rite, the stuck-togetherness of pornography and twisted organic materials. They are Actual Spells; totems to anchor something down. Desire to get the fuck out spliced with the fight instict. A perma-dukes up, bleeding knuckles and a broken bottle or two.

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.

Opening on Halloween / Dia de los Muertos was no accident. The back room of the gallery contains an altar for Danny Gallegos and Genesis P-Orridge, two people whose friendship heavily impacted Fletcher. The altar contains objects belonging to the deceased that Fletcher has in her possession as well as a photograph of P-Orridge and Gallegos together. The loss of physicality and transcendence to another plane is given honorable space for altars to be built and open to the public to add their own. Fletcher has been driving through the backroads of Texas. Late at night, after the fires go out, letting dirt fly against Ford truck metal.

—Jools Rothblatt