Jacob Lewis Gallery is pleased to present the ants are my friends and they’re blowin’ in the wind, a exhibition of new paintings by Josh Reames.

Josh Reames’s work embodies synthesis; an accumulation of the different and related exist cheek by jowl, thriving in an atmosphere which gives them equal consideration. Reames works are in uninterrupted conversation both among and within themselves. A canvas speaks to ranging thoughts, which in turn suggest interrelated concepts that spiral outward in a growing web of relationships; creating reinforcing and conflicting contexts that require the viewer to participate in their placement. The objects represented and their seeming irreverence stand in contrast to the act of painting on display, thick impasto nestles by delicate airbrush, trompe-l’oeil meets neon limes while tracks of thickly daubed paint delineate a wild dimensionality.

Reames creates visual languages as fluid and open as the Internet that inspires much of his work, as the artist attempts to describe the “slippery nature of meaning” in a time of ever-changing contexts. As a body, the artist envisions the work less as a narrative grouping than a “filtration device”, a net through which imagery and its associations pass. Leaves and scorch marks, snakes and fingerprints make multiple appearances, but each time as a reflection of something different. Here the leaves have lost their color, there the snake has lost its head, but they represent shifts in perspective. Every idea is seen in reference to the one preceding it, in turn informing the next, then circling back to create a new reality for the original; a cycle of understanding. Like the mondegreen title of the show, understanding is all contextual.