Our first reaction to the new paintings of Oliver Jeffers is that of loneliness. The spaceman in stuck in between home and the universe, inhabitants looking for answers in the night sky, solemn, quiet, looking for answers. The title of the show, For All We Know, leaves much to mystery, the things we have concluded about our world and the things we have yet to discover. The Belfast-born, NY-based painter just opened his new solo show at Bryce Wolkowitz, a departure from his past works we have seen at Lazarides in London only a few years ago.
From the gallery: Expanding on years of observation, from the history of his upbringing in Belfast, to contemporary New York City, Jeffers' evokes the precarious state of our home and its inhabitants. Inspired by Buckminster Fuller's seminal book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, he presents pianos as dubious flotation devices and our planet presented as a cumbersome motor vehicle, overheating as we argue over what to play on the radio. From researching astronaut's descriptions of looking at Earth from the distance of the Moon, Jeffers noticed certain recognizable patterns to the way in which he discussed the politics of his hometown from a vantage point of across the Atlantic Ocean. In finding that few people outside of Northern Ireland knew or cared of the intricate conflict there, a great waste of time was revealed: a divided population identical to each other in every way save for the flags they flew and the stories they told. Tragically, each side's identity are still firmly rooted to the existence of the other, and therefore locked into a spiral of repeated patterns.
