OFF LIMITS

“Seemingly captured and brought back to the gallery – enshrined not on the walls, as with a painting, but literally within them – these scenes, when made available for scrutiny, reveal themselves as the fictive imaginings they really are.”

“There are other worlds: they are in this one.”

The works of Patrick Jacobs intentionally blur boundaries among the traditional artistic media of painting, sculpture and photography. At the same time, they present the viewer with a spatial and perceptual conundrum. We are drawn into a space at once determinate and infinite, natural and contrived, prosaic and otherworldly. Here, reality has been de-familiarized, and the uncanny has supplanted the commonplace.

Installed within the exhibit wall, Mr. Jacobs’ meticulous works are viewed through circular windows of glass lenses. And yet, these artificial worlds are intended to be strangely real and tactile. Recalling the Claude glass, an optical device popular in the 18th century used to frame the picturesque, the lenses also invoke the invisible eye of the wary homeowner searching an otherwise vacant domestic landscape for imagined interlopers. Mr. Jacobs draws equal inspiration from 18th century landscape paintings and from Chevron Chemical Co.’s Ortho Books for pest control in the home and garden. With such a fusion of influences, his quiet compositions offer a magical view of the mundane.

Born in California in 1971, Patrick Jacobs currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. A kind of pseudo-science or homespun natural phenomena characterize Mr. Jacobs’ work whose protagonists are typically at odds with an increasingly anxious and paranoid world.