Beverly & Sam Ross Gallery
CURRENT ART EXHIBITION AT THE BEVERLY & SAM ROSS GALLERY
Brian R. Jobe & Jered Sprecher: Arrangements in Gravity
March 17 – April 25, 2025
Closing Reception: Friday, April 25 • 5:00 – 8:00 pm
“Something speaks to us, a sound, a touch, hardness or softness, it catches us and asks us to be formed.” – Anni Albers
When we were children we stacked stones, gathered sticks, felt the breeze on our faces, and stared at the sky. Play was and is serious business, a way to live in the world and yet not hold onto things too tightly.
The artists Brian R. Jobe and Jered Sprecher have known each other for over fifteen years and though their work is different, the poignant and playful are present in their work. One may think of the foundational Bauhaus material studies or Kindergarten Gifts as ways of understanding the material world as embedded with dynamic and meaningful relationships. There is a tender poetry when two or three disparate materials are assembled and held close by gravity.
In Sprecher’s paintings, swatches of found color and images of flowers are gathered and arranged in conversation with Jobe’s solid material dramas. For Jobe and Sprecher this is an exciting collaboration where each has an opportunity to see how their own work speaks to the other’s efforts. As they install the work, the space between the paintings and sculptures, and how it holds the room are central to the artist’s concerns.
We hope you step in, take a deep breath, exhale, consider the weight of brick stacked upon brick, the luminosity and density of colors layered over each other, consider the relationship between objects in this room. Look for the playful and poignant rooted in the work.
Jered Sprecher
As an artist I make paintings that exist in the sliver of space between abstraction and representation. I look to the lived daily experience of the present coupled with the artifacts of the past. My work compresses time into the surface of painting, that old technology. Increasingly flora, fauna, and natural phenomena hold my attention, as I wrestle with this imagery that we daily experience through our technology. Birds, plants, flowers, stones, and fires dissolve into the light of the screen, the digital lens, and the glowing tablet. There is something elegant and tragic about the evanescent light of the screen pressing the image of a delicate flower into one’s memory. Light, flower, and technology are here and also fade away.
Brian R. Jobe
Brian R. Jobe’s studio practice is focused on sculpture and installation. In his larger scale work, he creates schemes for public interaction through the delineation of pathways. His most recent work collages material into assemblages utilizing signifiers of natural and manufactured landscapes. The materials are stacked or held in compression, but without the use of hardware or adhesives. He desires a sort of inevitability to be felt within the viewer’s experience as they consider the material’s history and stream of consciousness associations.
His solo exhibitions have been on view at venues such as Mixed Greens Gallery (New York, NY), The Contemporary at Blue Star (San Antonio, TX), University of Wyoming (Laramie, WY), Alabama Contemporary Art Center (Mobile, AL), and McNay Art Museum (San Antonio, TX). He has permanent, outdoor sculptures located at the Western North Carolina Sculpture Park (Lenoir, NC) and Knoxville Botanical Garden and Arboretum (Knoxville, TN). Jobe received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2004 and Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2006.
The Beverly + Sam Ross Gallery is located on the lower level of Plough Memorial Library in the center of campus on the Buckman Quadrangle, easily accessible from the Central Avenue parking lot and the East Parkway entrance. All exhibits are free and open to the public.
CONTACT
Scott A. Carter, MFA
Assistant Professor and Gallery Coordinator • (901) 321-3243 • scarte20@cbu.edu
