We are that rare couple who has provided both support and artistic stimuli to each other through our creative works during the course of our 30-year marriage. Jeff Way has been exploring figure paintings in the context of culture and, Carolyn Oberst, has been playing with the double-sided memories of childhood.
Living in New York for more than half of our lives, we each have our own working studio on different floors of the same building, maintaining independent worlds of art while sharing all other aspects of our life. The exhibition at Vit Gallery in Seoul is the first overseas presentation of our work. For Korean audiences, we hope it will be a valuable opportunity to see the artwork that stems from our social and personal experiences.
Jeff Way My keen interest in the relationship between art and consciousness has led me to use a variety of media in my quest to shed light on how American society affects culture. From Elvis, Marilyn Monroe and other series of heroic figures, containing ample elements of pop art, I have created masks, performances and acrylic paintings. The same subject emerges, however, through all these different formats: the head. The head is the area that best captures and represents an entity’s character giving hints of the underlying consciousness.
I began making masks in the mid-1970’s when they were initially used in my live performances. Later on, I developed the masks as sculptural objects with clear influences from Indians of the Americas and natives of Africa. The bold contrasts of color, and multitude of media used, combine to establish another singular expression of the life of the subconscious. Through the mediums of drawings and collage I have done continuous research on deformation and distortion of heads. Some of these pieces reveal my significant connection to cubism. This connection is not surprising as ritual African masks and sculpture also inspired the early European cubists.
Included in this exhibition are three of my latest paintings, titled, “Topsy-Turvy”. They are a continuation of the Grid Head Series, which is based on the use of a mask-like face with interwoven bands of color and minimal features. Here, the two heads going in opposite directions evokes a paradoxical uneasiness by being simultaneously funny and intense. The heads are surrounded and enfolded in lush drapery that interacts with the stretching and twisting of the Grid Heads, creating what appears to be a real space juxtaposed with the dreamlike images.
Carolyn Oberst Like the early Surrealists, I have been using images of toys to create an emotional impact. My new paintings feature bright colors and lively shapes, which employ my own wood relief technique. After cutting the wood shapes, each piece of the relief is painted separately with oil paint. I then assemble the pieces by screwing them on a painted wood panel from behind. It’s a very labor intensive, intricate and complicated process. This way of working allows me to make a comment on the state of our contemporary lives, which, I feel, falls on the cusp of fun and scary. Abstracting from my drawings of vintage toys, I’m expressing that childhood, and, by implication, adult life as well, isn’t what it used to be. We’re all more busy and bombarded with input than ever before.
On the other hand, this series of paintings expresses that complications, juxtapositions, multi-tasking, etc., can be fun and interesting. So, although challenging, our modern lives are not dull or boring. The colorful oil on wood relief and animated quality give these paintings a hopeful, happy feel that captures the upbeat side of this new order. In this way I’m depicting both the positive (fun) and negative (scary) sides of these issues and giving expression to many feelings at the same time.
Both of us use deconstruction as an approach to making art in our own unique ways. Living side by side, yet working separately, we tell our own stories, but one can see from our work that the communication between us is clear.
