Jason Jacques Gallery will commemorate this spring with a synthesis of the old and the new, in more ways than one. The show will feature a selection of works by our familiar and stellar roster of contemporary artists, including Eric Serritella, Morten Løbner Espersen, Osamu Kojima, Gareth Mason, Anne Marie Laureys, and Kim Simonsson. We will also be showing, for the first time, the works of Brooklyn-based and endlessly inventive artist, Shari Mendelson.

Her artworks, which carry the looks and charm of ancient archaeological finds, are in fact contemporary both in terms of material and concept. They deal with the predicaments surrounding objects from the past and those from the present. On the one hand, we are confronted with rarity, fragility, and the near-impossibility of preservation— on the other, with the inescapable issue of superabundance, waste, permanence, and the fact that the endless materials of our lives may outlast us.

Curiously, Mendelson has come to approach these complex dilemmas head-on through recycling, for sometimes best ideas hide in plain sight. Her works are made with a variety of mixed materials and found plastics which all come together to form an enigmatic vision of times past, in which the opposition between 'trash' and 'treasure' is, ultimately, collapsed.