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Jarrett Min Davis
Guts and Glory
| Hear the Artist: | |
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| Describe your work | |
| Considering new works | |
| Time frame | |
| On irony | |
| Paper lanterns | |
Artist Statement:
The Guts and Glory series is about the ambiguity, terror, pride, sacrifice and death of the soldier on the battlefield. The figures are drawn from various cultures and conflicts from around the globe, with a special interest in World War I and the wars of colonial expansion. This work is about the moral and political ambiguity of the pursuit of war and their meaning to the soldier on the battlefield.
Before the advent of photojournalism, it wasn't uncommon to see paintings/etchings to documenting important battles that often bordered on propaganda for the victors or mawkish sentimentality for the vanquished. The work explores the area between these two extremes and instead focuses on the experiences of the individual soldier. While, Military history paintings often focus on important moments or heroic actions, I want to depict the horrible and vicious moments of battle that are contained within the heroic ones.
This work isn't about judging the morals or politics of war, but rather it is intended to highlight the soldiers who sacrifice their lives and psyches for these political aims. The work is built up to induce a narrative-like quality, yet the stories are meant as discontinuous ones. Germans, Japanese, Americans, Russian, English, French, Chinese, Korean soldiers play their assigned parts in each of these paintings: continually fighting and continually dying on various battlefields locked in a never-ending struggle.
About the Artist:
Jarrett Min Davis was born in Seoul, South Korea, and adopted by American parents at the age of two. He was raised in St. Louis and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Dayton in Ohio. He then went on to earn a Masters of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art and Design's Hoffberger School of Painting in Baltimore. He currently resides in Chelsea, Massachusetts, and teaches in the Studio Foundation Program at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. He has exhibited work nationally and internationally with recent exhibitions in Baltimore and Bangkok, Thailand.
STEP UP 2010 is made possible with the generous support of Real Art Ways Members, the National Endowment for the Arts, Sandy and Howard Fromson, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism, the Alexander A. Goldfarb Memorial Trust, the Nimoy Foundation, the National Performance Network's Visual Artists Network, Lincoln Financial Group, Travelers and Greater Hartford Arts Council's United Arts Campaign.