Jae Sterling: Seven Portals

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Jae Sterling, "Portal No.1," 2022

digital painting

Jae Sterling: Seven Portals

Opening Reception: Friday, March 25th from 6PM-10PM

The pandemic is a portal—a looking glass—that has forced us to confront the past, process the present, and consider new futures in a multiplicity of ways. In this new body of work, Jae Sterling documents the strange, surreal, and survivalist elements of our times through an immersive installation of visuals and soundscapes. Seven Portals reflects on the drastic shifts in our current reality, inviting us to enter the threshold to an oasis of art, water, and light and emerge on the other end—refreshed and renewed.

Blurring the lines between street & trap culture and the aesthetics of contemporary art, Sterling’s work veers between overwhelming mosh pits and poetic contemplations of the visuals and work of dreamspaces, expanding on the worlds he has created over the years. With Seven Portals, Sterling offers a meditative, enveloping space of transitory ideas, accessed through the portals that exist all around us.

Jae Sterling is a multidisciplinary artist and founding member of the SANSFUCCS/FOREIGNERZ collective. Beginning as a musician, he has extended his artforms to include acrylic and oil painting, digital design, mixed media, streetwear design, creative direction, and writing. Through his early years in Kingston, Jamaica to the landscapes of North America, Jae has spent the past few years developing his artistry by weaving his experiences growing up in Jamaica and South Florida, and coming into adulthood in Canada. Jae’s more recent work (falling under the self-styled title of BULLY) looks to examine culture, sexuality, violence and art’s ability to retell and heal histories while simultaneously violating them.

Among many achievements in both music and visual arts, Sterling’s exploration in hip hop led him to participate in National Music Centre’s 2019 Alberta Residency Program. To date, Sterling has released four music projects and has toured across Alberta and Ontario. In 2020, his ambitious year-long project, Riding Horses with White Men, debuted in Calgary in summer 2020 and led to him being one of Calgary’s first Black muralists with the painting of The Guide & Protector in Chinatown. In 2022, Jae curated the multimedia exhibition New Architects In A Liminal Time featuring pandemic art with work from 17 Alberta-based artists in Calgary. Most recently, Sterling was selected by Telus Storyhive and The Black Screen Office to create a film around his essay and short stories from Riding Horses With White Men.