Taking its title from an old word meaning westerly progress, Westing presents an early-career survey of Jason Meyer’s sculpture. Meyer combines intensive processes with his curiosity and material sensitivity throughout works that date from 1999 to the present.
Utilizing materials that shift between human-made and organic, these sculptures explore Western culture’s relationship to the natural world. Antler, hide, and soil succumb to physical abstraction, rigid structure, and geometry while steel, electrical wire, and plastic are manipulated into organic forms. Meyer’s works examine our strange position among a world that we simultaneously study, define, deny, destroy, protect, and romanticize.
Westing is the second of ICA’s emerging artist retrospectives which present new works in context with rarely seen older pieces in order to reveal formal and conceptual arcs created over time. Jason Meyer is a Midwesterner living in the East. After receiving a BFA from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, he spent a decade in Chicago before moving to Baltimore. He has shown nationally in Chicago, Miami, New Jersey, Michigan, and Kentucky drawing reviews in Sculpture, Art Papers, and various newspapers. Locally, Meyer organized and curated Regeneration as part of the 2011 Baltimore Green Week and co-curated the recent Division of Labor at Current Gallery.
The Institute of Contemporary Art, Baltimore is a new roving institution founded in 2011 focused on identifying artists in the Mid-Atlantic region for career-spanning exhibitions of their work. Once chosen for their artist-directed retrospectives, these artists are encouraged to consider their whole body of work, under what conditions it would best be shown, and what resources would need to be marshaled. The ICA works with the artist to make this vision a reality. Together with occasional one-off projects by local, national and international artists, the ICA disregards the institution as cultural gatekeeper and asserts the primacy of the artist and the ability of the individual (or group) to achieve a singular vision.
