Jed Dunkerley
Consumption

April 11th - May 3rd 2025

Opening night reception Friday, April 11th 6-9pm

Please contact us to get larger images , detail images, or a video walk around of a piece!

We are pleased to present our first solo show by Seattle based painter Jed Dunkerley. Known for his work that blends environmental inspiration with a humorous graphic sensibility, his new series shows gorgeous landscapes with sinewy ribbons and banners twisting in primary colors in the foreground. What initially seems like a pop abstraction of riotous party confetti is revealed to actually be scientific diagrams of what digestive enzymes look like.
Growing up as a child he went on adventure wilderness camping trips, falling in love with the spectacular beauty of nature, only to be suddenly disquieted by rampant destruction of said beauty seeming around every corner of a protected paradise. His work seeks to reconcile his desire to express the majestic grandeur of the wild while also finding a way to talk about unsettling realities and the changing nature of the world in the Anthropocene.

“Perhaps you’ve had that effective reckoning, when you’ve first faced violent realities. It’s stayed with me like a scar and informed the bulk of my artistic output: depicting our rapacious consumption of natural resources with satires and contrasts; infusing it with subtle humor, dark beauty, and absurd exaggeration, since nobody wants to look at how I really feel about it, much less hang it on the wall. Recently in my non-fiction pleasure reading, I came across ‘ribbon diagrams’- 3D analogs of the basic course and structure of proteins. Their form caught my attention, at once reminding me of those colorful tinker toy ‘bead mazes’ (I looked it up- that’s what they’re called!) in the kids’ corner of the dentist office, cut with high-quality rail-car graffiti. The ones I saw depicted human digestive enzymes… The muses immediately thrust the images I’ve painted here upon my brain: Resource consumption, in bold-colored metaphor with garishly seductive graphics. The very molecules that metabolize proteins, carbohydrates, and lipids loudly superimposed onto scenic landscapes from my own ‘postcard photo’ collection. An attempt at contemplating our gluttonous ruin of the natural world while simultaneously appreciating its beauty. “ - Jed Dunkerley