March 26 - May 1, 2021
Ericka Jeffries
Fragments Now Bright, Now Dim
"Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.”
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando,1928
Quappi Projects is pleased to present Ericka Jeffries’ “Fragments Now Bright, Now Dim.” Informed by memories of powerful sensory experiences and the paradoxical coupling of trauma and nostalgia, Jeffries’ work is complex, subversive, chromatically lush, and wonderfully strange. Although she has exhibited in numerous galleries and institutions around the country, “Fragments Now Bright, Now Dim” is her first solo exhibition.
In order to create, all visual artists are driven in some capacity to look; endowed with an innately sensitive and empathic temperament, Jeffries peers inward and backward through time to discover and retrieve subject matter. Her process begins at the advent of an intuitive moment, lucid dream, episode of déjà vu, or an incident that triggers a strong memory demanding to be painted. Working by instinct and free association, Jeffries makes use of personal photographs and artifacts to explore her own history. Assigning images and imagery to particular memories or experiences, she conjures amalgamated compositions whose visual dualities mirror the conceptual combinations that initially stir her creative impulses.
Using a minimum of two photographs to build a compositional reference, Jeffries utilizes software such as Photoshop, Procreate and Zbrush to manipulate her images until they elicit the mood desired. She neither works with rigid expectations at the outset nor simply replicates her source material in a separate medium. “I am specifically fascinated with material objects and imagery that are used as receptacles, inside of which people mentally hide their emotional and physical traumas,” she says. The resulting compositions—peculiar, ethereal, psychologically intense—recall the work of Surrealists Dorothea Tanning and Leonora Carrington; Jeffries’ fixation on interiority paired with environments steeped in the omnipresence of the natural world feels both ancient and new, reaching back to German Expressionists like Franz Marc and Gabriele Münter while also reflecting the moods present in the work of contemporary painters like Shara Hughes and the late Matthew Wong.
Created with careful precision, drawings also hold a place of great importance in Jeffries’ practice. Whereas the mark making in her paintings is vigorous and varied, it is delicate, intimate, and meditative when rendered in graphite. More than simply studies accompanying her works on canvas, Jeffries’ drawings are alternative interpretations of her dreams and memories—quieter, more muffled, further out of reach, as if observed through gauze or the haze of sleep.
Full of intricate narrative content, Jeffries’ paintings also teem with exuberant, undeniable color; a florid, intangible force seemingly emanates from their surfaces. Since childhood, she has experienced a form of synesthesia where sounds and mental images—particularly those associated with various kinds of energy—cause her to see specific hues. As a girl, the crackle of the refrigerator freezer making ice caused her to envision deep purple aura orbs flashing; nocturnal house groans induced small orange aura orbs. “This synesthesia has strongly informed the way I rely on color to support mood in my work,” says Jeffries. “I also look to artists such as Agnes Pelton and Hilma af Klint for the atmospheres they create with color to allude to and talk about spiritual and transcendent spaces. It feels as if both of them know something that’s very real that they’re very sure of but lacks any human explanation.”
Jeffries’ vivid and distinct use of color once prompted a former painting professor to forewarn her work as “capable of causing cavities.” The sweetness of her palette belies a subtle but pervasive ominousness, though she rejects any notion of negativity simply because of the work’s often distressing genesis. Instead, she describes what she creates as “a pulse, an outreach for things close and far away, tangible and intangible, a memory web that is deeply spiritual at its core and knows it is not tethered strictly to any individual truth.” Although memory can be truth, it isn’t always; nonetheless, we each work with and through our individual pasts to move forward. Replete with striking and evocative symbolism, Jeffries’ diaristic vision presents a hopeful, ornamented renewal that feels quite welcome in these days of waning winter and a potential emergence from the collective stupor inflicted upon us by the COVID-19 pandemic.
—John Brooks
Born in 1991, Jeffries is a Louisville native once again based in her hometown after several years in New York City. She received a BFA in Studio Art from the University of Louisville in 2014 and an MFA in Painting from the New York Academy of Art in 2019.
