Jay Dart | GONE HOME

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Jay Dart, “Clear 'Em Out,” 2023

graphite, watercolour pencil, pastel on paper, 24 x 18 inches (courtesy of the gallery)

“Atop the hills of excess fill, amid the Vooka storm of yawns and dust, wonderers ponder airborne fathoms and scrawls amongst our past us.” – Jiggs 

For over a decade, Jay Dart has been developing a series of drawings featuring his alter ego, Jiggs, and a cast of wanderers in the whimsical mindscape known as Yawnder through which a narrative continues to evolve about the mystical nature of inspiration, the quest for innovative creation, and the dissemination of ideas. Within this conceptually layered world, Dart explores themes of identity, innocence lost/recovered, isolation, ecology, and interconnection in modern society. 

This series has resulted in almost 300 pieces, including mixed-media works, installations, animated videos and bookworks that add another dimension to the works on paper. To mark the occasion of the 10th anniversary of his first bookwork and the inception of this body of work, Dart will be exhibiting new drawings alongside rarely-exhibited past works from the Yawnder series in a show titled Ten Hundred Years of Yawns & Dust. It is fitting that this touring anniversary exhibition begins at Galerie Youn since the gallery is also celebrating a 10-year anniversary, and it was here, in 2013, that Dart exhibited work from this series for the first time in a professional setting.

Many of Dart’s newest drawings harken back to the earliest settings of the Yawnder saga. However, a decade later, things have changed a little as the mystical dust storm of Vooka has blown in from the previously unexplored part of his mindscape called the Unknowns. The name for this atmospheric event references the concept of VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) which has been used to describe the state of anxious, unpredictability that defines the “new normal” of our times. The wanderers in the Yawnderverse must now contend with what’s “in the air” figuratively but also literally as they ponder their airborne surroundings.

As in Dart’s past exhibitions, he continues to find new approaches to presenting his drawings so that the scenes extend beyond the picture planes. Among his newest works is a series of drawings on panels where the compositions carry on from the front of the panels along the sides and continue onto the walls. The installation of these 10 drawings presents a continuous landscape of the notable sites within the semi-biographical world that he has explored … so far.