High Desert Homecoming / Nude Masculine States
Jamie Gray: High Desert Homecoming / Jon Sargent: Nude Masculine States
September 1-October 1, 2023; September 1-October 29, 2023
Bell Projects
2822 E. 17th Avenue, Denver, CO 80206
Admission: free
Review by MG Bernard
Since moving in January 2022 from the Walnut Workshop—an artist studio community in Denver’s RiNo district—to its new location on East 17th Avenue across from City Park, Lindsey Bell’s commercial gallery Bell Projects has risen “into the light,” as Westword puts it, “bringing along challenging shows by [emerging] artists.” [1] For the month of September, Bell has curated two solo exhibitions in the space by artists Jamie Gray (in the front gallery) and Jon Sargent (in Bell Project’s Living Room gallery). Gray’s High Desert Homecoming and Sargent’s Nude Masculine States together share the common theme of nature.
A view of Jamie Gray’s exhibition High Desert Homecoming at Bell Projects. Image by DARIA.
Jamie Gray’s modern wall sculptures are composed of hand-cut and -carved, reclaimed wood forms sealed in encaustic wax. As she describes in her statement, “My simple shapes and patterns are a visual manifestation of how I see and understand natural forms—from clouds to cacti, fungi to fossils, lichen to leaves, pinecones to pebbles, and seeds to streams.” [2] Works like Terra Lantern (2023) and Crown Canopy (2023) are an ode to formalism, materiality, the artist’s hand, and Gray’s father who is a fine woodworker in Buena Vista, Colorado. Gray appropriates nature via an artistic reconfiguration of aesthetic design.
Jamie Gray, Terra Lantern, 2023, encaustic on reclaimed wood, 48 x 22 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
Jamie Gray, Terra Lantern (detail), 2023, encaustic on reclaimed wood, 48 x 22 inches. Image by DARIA.
In Terra Lantern, Gray stacks ovoid shapes with pointed ends in a vertical pile on the wall, like rocks in a cairn. Within each shape, dark lines radiate from either a central point or from an edge on a warm background. The lines aren’t just drawn but incised in the encaustic surface, emphasizing that mark-making is a form of carving. This work and others in the show ask viewers to contemplate the demarcations between painting and sculpture—whether these forms are minimalist paintings on shaped panels or carved sculptures with encaustic details.
Jamie Gray, Crown Canopy, 2023, encaustic on reclaimed wood, 44 x 28 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
Crown Canopy features more circular forms in a more open array, resembling a handful of cut gems. The background color is pale yellow, but once again the carved, dark, radiating lines decorate the surface. In the smaller shapes, however, the lines go in just two directions from a central line, akin to veins in a leaf. Like the patterns and variations in an Agnes Martin’s 1963 painting Flower in the Wind, the viewer must decipher the repetitions to understand the whole work.
A view of Jon Sargent’s exhibition Nude Masculine Series at Bell Projects. Image by DARIA.
While Gray deals primarily with shape, color, and pattern to hint at natural forms, Sargent, on the other hand, captures nature via black and white photography for a more situational purpose. As his biography explains, Sargent “grew up among turtles, bugs, and snakes in Florida. Like his crawling friends, he feels mostly at home in the outdoors.” His love of the natural world, his experiences with bullying, and an absent positive male role model growing up has created the framework for his exploration of body image and masculinity. [3] For Nude Masculine States, Sargent subverts toxic masculinity and what film theorist Laura Mulvey terms the “male gaze” by intentionally placing anonymous, nude, male figures in Colorado’s grand, mountainous, and overwhelming landscapes.
A view of Jon Sargent’s exhibition Nude Masculine Series at Bell Projects. Image by MG Bernard.
In her essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Mulvey defines the male gaze as the presentation of women in film, art, and literature from a male, heterosexual perspective. Women are depicted as objects, and most of the time sexual objects, for the pleasure of the male viewer. [4] In art historical terms, paintings such as Titian’s 1534 painting Venus of Urbino is a classic example of an artwork made for the male gaze. An unidentified, nude woman reclines on a luxurious bed in an expensive bedroom. She stares directly at her viewer(s) while playfully covering her mons. She represents a fantasy woman sumptuously inviting her male suitor to join her in bed.
Jon Sargent, Belly of the Whale, 2022, photography, 11 x 14 inches. Image by DARIA.
By replacing the subject of his works with a nude man, Sargent complicates the traditional art narrative that only women must be naked to enter the museum. [5] In his photograph Belly of the Whale (2022), the artist has pushed his male model’s front-body up against a large boulder so that the audience faces the figure’s back and buttocks. Unlike Titian’s imaginatively inviting Venus of Urbino, Sargent’s figure hides his face in a manner that evokes “please, don’t look at me.” The figure’s hidden face erases the identity specific to himself, and as a result, his body is no longer his but the representation and even the object of “ideal masculinity.” What’s more, the artist blends the figure’s body into the rock-scape, almost crushing it under the weight of the prevailing boulder.
Jon Sargent, Veil of Masculinity, 2022, photography, 11 x 14 inches. Image by DARIA.
In Veil of Masculinity (2022), the only photograph where the male figure looks back at the viewer, Sargent has veiled his subject’s entire body in a thin, translucent, white fabric, again hiding the figure’s identity. His arms sensually reach up above his head and his legs stand slightly apart. The male figure invites his audience into the landscape with him, but still hides himself under the veil. Ultimately, Jon Sargent’s Nude Masculine States subvert the male gaze by positioning the male body as object and pokes fun at toxic masculinity by placing his male subjects (as objects) in large landscapes that overpower the figure’s humanity, identity, and masculinity.
A view of Jamie Gray’s exhibition High Desert Homecoming at Bell Projects. Image by DARIA.
High Desert Homecoming and Nude Masculine States are two solo exhibitions that speak to the natural world, albeit using opposite conventions. While Gray interprets nature via a formalist point of view through her material and process choices—using reclaimed wood and creating shapes that implicate natural forms—Sargent employs nature via a contextual perspective. [6] Collectively, however, both exhibitions utilize scopophilia or “the love of looking” and invite viewers to take pleasure in observing and even embodying the aesthetics of their artworks.
Mary Grace Bernard (MG, she/her) is a transmedia and performance artist, educator, advocate, and crip witch. Her practice finds itself at the intersection of performance art, transmedia installation art, art scholarship, art writing, curation, and activism.
[1] Westword, “Best of Denver 2022, Best New Gallery: Bell Projects,” 2022, https://www.westword.com/best-of/2022/arts-and-entertainment/best-new-gallery-13805902.
[2] Jamie Gray, “High Desert Homecoming Press Release,” Bell Projects, September 1-October 1, 2023, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5fa8bca05b3b175c6ec3c53a/t/64ef7e75c60ca66d4b2642f5/1693417078061/High+Desert+Homecoming.pdf.
[3] Especially a man who resembles the patriarchal ideal of the “perfect body,” i.e., white, muscular, tall, and thin. Quotation from Jon Sargent, “Nude Masculine States Press Release,” Bell Projects, September 1-October 29, 2023, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5fa8bca05b3b175c6ec3c53a/t/64f0d5c1235b204a4881e084/1693504973989/Nude+Masculine+States.pdf.
[4] Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, Autumn 1975: 6-18.
[5] From the Guerrilla Girls’ statement “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are woman, but 85% of the nudes are female.” https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/guerrilla-girls-do-women-have-to-be-naked-to-get-into-the-met-museum-p78793.
[6] A contextual perspective is one that consists of all the influential elements about an artwork or artist, but which are not actually part of the artwork.
