Strand Gallery
August 25 - October 7, 2018
Opening Reception Saturday, August 25, 2018
6:00 – 9:00 PM
Artist talk at 6:30 PM
Jesse Morgan Barnett
Totally Okay
Jesse Morgan Barnett is a Fort Worth-based artist known for his consideration of appropriated images, objects, and events based on an aging interest in proposal and drift. LOW MAGIC builds off Barnett’s previous work dealing with compensation, agnostic confidence, and permutations between schadenfreude (pleasure derived from another person’s misfortune) and mudtia (pure joy unadulterated by self-interest). During the summer of 2016, Barnett began corresponding with Valery Spiridonov. At that time, Spiridonov, who lives with a degenerative muscle disease, was the first confirmed head/body transplantation patient, with an operation planned for December of 2017 in Harbin, China. Unexpectedly, in the summer of 2017, Spiridonov’s operation was cancelled and his campaign ended abruptly. Spiridonov would not be made in China, after all. Mulling over ideas to arrive at some compensatory relief, LOW MAGIC ’s amalgamation of images, objects, and language hopes to work through questions about conditionality, perseverance, and naturalistic interpretations of luck.
Jesse Morgan Barnett (South Korea) is a Fort Worth-based artist who received his M.F.A. (Intermedia) from the University of Texas at Arlington in 2011. His work has been exhibited at the Dallas Museum of Art, Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas), Dallas Contemporary, INTERSTATE (Brooklyn), Lawndale Art Center (Houston), FQ projects (Shanghai), Gallery Rostrum (Malmö), and Pushkin & Gogol (Berlin). His work has also been featured in publications such as Adbusters, Flash Forward, and Semigloss. magazine. Barnett co-curates the Dallas Biennial and is an assistant curator of education at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. His work attempts to reassess browsing, proposition, agnosticism, and anniversaries.
