Building on the success of ‘Inner City Ooz’, Jack G. Marshall returns to Display Gallery for his first solo exhibition in the UK, ‘Low battery’. Fascinated by the seemingly inanimate, yet dense urban environment, Marshall has created a collection of works that aim to record the shifting rhythmic identity of culture and the city.

Drawing on the Henri Lefebvre’s ‘Rhythmanalysis', a volume of essays where the philosopher outlines a method for analysing the rhythms of urban spaces and the effects those rhythms have on people, ‘Low battery’ is a study of urban surfaces, examining the varying rhythms imposed on the city by its inhabitants.

Extracting from and engaging with the graphic elements of urbane themes such as regeneration, vandalism, advertising and noise pollution, Marshall layers and assembles disjointed narratives that resemble the art of the comic. Scratches, marks, shreds of paper, and sprayed paint find their way onto walls creating a tapestry of impulses and motives. Ever-changing, these plains of colour and texture are an absorption of the human condition by the city.

By reimagining this environment as a world of dialectical graphics, the artist hopes to pick away the layers of thought and realign them into unfinished conversations and fragmented stories.

Inspired by celebrated contemporary American cartoonists Charles Burns and Gary Panter, whose affiliation with the music scene has defined their work, Marshall experiments with a form of layered painting that can be read like a comic book, or watched like a film.

Jack G. Marshall (b.1992) is an English artist and illustrator working with painting, illustration, drawing and photography. Trying to reclaim the magic embedded in seemingly mundane routines, his work is an ongoing study of the everyday life. Construction and deconstruction are often engaged, allowing the image to oscillate between abstraction and representation. He attended a Foundation Course in Art & Design at Camberwell College of Arts, however he considers himself a self-taught artist.

In his own words his work is: ‘largely illustrative even though I use paint. My influences come from illustrators and cartoonists and my work tries to combine the illustrative content (seen as immediate and graphic) with the painterly approach (seen as gradual and contemplative).’