Artist's Statement:
The through line of my work is rooted in a continuous exploration of the practice of time- stamping experience through various forms of artistic language. Wether it is writing, painting or most recently composing I am always capturing the moments of my life. Over the past decade I have concentrated heavily on visual arts, using painting as a way of mounting experiences to various mediums in the same ways that passport stamps mark travel.
By engaging in different forms of abstract expressionism, including abstract self portraiture, interactive fabric sculpture, canvas sculpture and assemblage I am constantly in pursuit of interchanging disciplines, like language, in order to express what’s current within me and around me.
My recent body of work grounds itself in the use of materials and themes associated with the historic and present grief surrounding the Black experience in America. Repetitiously using combinations of sand, seashells, rice, pennies, rope, chains, wood and other objects that point to an ongoing history of oppression, I add texture to an abstract practice, creating dialogue about a change that still hasn’t been fully realized for black people.
Jamel Robinson - New York, New York 2023
