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Jake Gilson is relentless in his drive to capture insight and give it two- or three-dimensional form. Like a daredevil who must see how close to the edge he can get without going over, he creates images of such enigmatic power that they remain in the mind for a long time, tugging at the edge of understanding. Gilson produces a continuous bombardment of visual descriptions of the ever-changing unknown. His forms are deliberately inexplicable; his textures deepen the mystery by their very richness. His content is literally a matter of life and death.

Gilson uses his materials with great force. He chemically manipulates sheets of steel by flooding the surface with an acid called gun bluing to achieve his subtle modulations of tone and image. He has taken up "drawing" with gunpowder. The resulting images, enriched with color and line, fairly explode on the retina. The mortality rate is high, as one would expect.

The palette used by Jake Gilson is minimal, tending toward dark tonalities, pitch-black, and smudged white with a few reds and blues chosen for their emotional and existential intensity. His mediums are printer's ink, wood block ink, graphite, oil stick, and dry pigment, which he smudges with his fingers to get a complex, velvety depth. Many of his pieces contain tiny, precisely spaced dots that float like an optical illusion above the abyss. These ambiguous figures provide a metaphorical framework to pin down the consciousness - or perhaps simply to indicate the surface of the image, like distant buoys on a midnight sea.

Although Gilson uses such imagery because of its non-referential quality, he also has a concise vocabulary of evocative abstract forms such as bowl shapes that he calls "floats." Another recurring trapezoidal figure is a sarcophagus. Every shape he has ever used is based on something that holds volume. Perhaps that volume is life, or thought, or even wisdom. Whatever it is, the work of art surrounding the vessel form emphasizes the fragile, volatile nature of existence.

Gilson's art faces death as unflinchingly as it addresses life. The artist's attention is riveted on the instant between life and death that provides the decisive moment of insight, the brief and perfect moment when everything coalesces and the mind says, "oh." In that split second of freedom lies total awareness.

Gilson thrusts into the heart of that enigma and consumes all that is not truth, using every active medium and technique at his disposal to strip clean the final paradox. What is left after all else has burned away is the state of limitlessness or ultimate reality that is one of the central precepts of Tibetan Buddhism and Sufism. With a lack of sentimentality appropriate to world's foremost reality-based religion, Gilson presents tough, solid works of art that stay the course of a lifelong quest for enlightenment.

Gallery Hours:
Tuesday through Friday 10am-5:30pm
Saturday 11am-4pm
and by appointment

Please contact Pam or Bill Campbell at wcca@flash.net or at 817-737-9566 for more information.