Jason Rohlf:

“Aeronauts & Oracles” is my ongoing effort as an artist to collect and preserve my visual sensibilities. With each piece being the field for continued exploration as countless layers of collage, mediums and acrylic paint coalesce to become a finished painting.

The one thing I can count on in defiance of my intent and regardless of how hopeful my expectations, each attempt will undergo many revisions as I participate in the creation of a piece, with the end result ideally being the cumulative effect of the whole and not just working toward the outermost layer. Like a recalled memory once obscured things, hidden elements from the pieces past will form an essential role on the surface; often as relief, while the most hard-fought details will likely earn a swift opaque topcoat as a result of each day’s fits and starts. By conveying an urban palimpsest, many of the most thoughtful moments occur as these conflicting efforts achieve harmony and then begin to recede, resulting in the melding of competing ideas.

The end results will ideally continue to serve up a variety of visual reminders or clues telling how important certain influences have been and over time where they led. Hopefully, over many years this process will allow me to imagine the body of work as a stop-action timeline slowly revealing the newly favored elements only to see them diminish and evolve again as my changing guides and exposure leave its mark on my art making.

Connecting me to a childhood spent exploring the abandoned barns of Wisconsin, my mind filled with UFOs and the supernaturall, the vastness of The Re Institute allows me for the first time to realize my visions of an exhibition combining the feeling of a temple of cosmic cartography and an Oracle's hallucinatory insights. This show brings together many of the large-scale works on tarps and shop rags since they were painted during my residency at the Golden Paint Foundation in late 2015.