I was in a fun show last month with one of my former grads, Jane Jun! Matt Ballou and Jane Jun: Identify featured self-portraits investigating our sense of self and projection of meaning. Though I really enjoyed many of Jane’s works on plexi that were in the exhibition, I personally love this one that has been hanging in my studio for years:

A sketch by Jane Jun that she gave me right before graduating a few years ago.

Above you can see installation shots from the Columbus Art Council’s Rosenzweig Gallery in Mississippi. Jane Jun and I had a two person show there through the month of August. Jane was one of my grads, and she was wonderful to work with. I’m really grateful I got to be a part of her story.

Us, pointing off into the distance…

Though Jane lives in Korea now, I was able to arrange to put on this show of small works about identity and self-portraiture using many of the pieces Jane had in her Thesis Exhibition. Aislinn Nolte, a former student of mine as well, is now the director of the Columbus Art Center and helped us make connections. I’m pleased with how she hung the show and glad to have gotten to show some strange works that I made in 2015 with this exhibition in mind.

Self Portrait with Halo, acrylic on canvas, 2001.

The pieces I showed were reinterpretations of self portraits I had made as an undergraduate nearly 20 years ago. You can see the two new versions of my Self Portrait with Halo at the top of this post. My method was to take images of these older self portraits and rework them digitally in my iPad. After satisfied with the digital states, I printed the works out onto canvas using a large format printer here in the Mizzou Art Department. Finally, I mounted the prints onto panel, sealed them, and then worked back into them in acrylic or oil.

These new versions of the older works – as well as the multi-stepped process I used to create them, were intended to critique and transform the meaning of the original works in the light of my life experience since they were first created. The process mimicked my physical and intellectual changes, and resulted in pieces intended to be funny or poignant.

Self Portrait With Candle, digital state, 2015, after a work made in oil on panel in 2003.

 I had a good time preparing these works for exhibition and hope to show them again at some point. I’m sure Jane won’t mind!

JJ!