Tuesday Edition: Trey Speegle
Can You Imagine
8"x10" ($20) | 11"x14" ($50) | 16"x20" ($200)
by
Trey Speegle
Tuesday greetings from hot and sunny New York! It's in the nineties here, and we're doing all we can to keep ourselves cool at 20x200 HQ. This is Youngna Park, filling in for Jen today, who touched down to pink-streaked skies at JFK last night en route back from the The Hyères Festival in the South of France. She is in town ever-so-briefly before leaving for the NEXT Art Fair in Chicago tomorrow, where she and Jen Bekman Gallery's Associate Director, Jeffrey Teuton, will be at Booth 7-8033 with work on view by Sarah McKenzie and many JBG & 20x200 artists. But, before we go into what's upcoming, let's start with today's edition.
Today we bring you Can You Imagine, new work from Trey Speegle, whose large-scale collage OK, was our first introduction to the reassuring messages possible in paint-by-numbers. Can You Imagine is a mighty fine sequel to OK, with a cooling palette of sixty colors that invites us to jump right into its refreshing waves. With water in blue, green, turquoise and purple crashing against rocky cliffs, we can imagine taking a dive into this rejuvenating sea, right this instant.
Paint-by-numbers, the 50s art kit invented by Palmer Paint Company's Dan Robbins, invited the everyman to pick up a paintbrush. Far from abiding to the uniformity of a painting with prescribed colors, Speegle's personal collection of 2,500+ vintage paint-by-numbers is a nearly limitless starting point for unique reinterpretation as he enlarges the picture plane, silkscreens it onto canvas, then mixes an original palette for each work.
As you know, 20x200 is also a great friend of the intersection of text and art, embracing phrases that make us contemplate sometimes-comic, sometimes-inspirational simple statements made bold. Mike Monteiro's refrain, Let's make better mistakes tomorrow, is a—literally, black and white—statement about the humor in fallibility. Matt Jones' Get Excited and Make Things inspires us to get up and do something, a message about initiative and innovation. Like Jones, Speegle offers us an inspirational challenge: Can You Imagine is a boundless message about possibility and wonder, even when each color stays within the lines. As Mr. Speegle says himself, it is both profound and mundane, "where the impulse to create lives." If you're in New York, Trey's original paint-by-numbers are currently on view at Cheryl Hazan Gallery in the group show, Spring Sequence; you can catch them there through May 25th.
So, as mentioned, Jen's zipping off to Chicago to meet Jeffrey at NEXT. The walls of our booth will feature a lovely selection of paintings from Sarah McKenzie, including some brand new pieces. We'll also have a flat file full of paintings and photographs from other members of the JBP family, including Ian Baguskas, Gregory Krum, Carrie Marill and Christian Chaize. Please do ask to have a look at those. Jen's also participating in the NEXT Talk Shop series which is running concurrent to the fair. She'll be appearing alongside other art world renegades on the Alternative Spaces and the Creative Current panel which is happening on Sunday, May 3rd, 2:30 - 3:30 at The Merchandise Mart.
We've got lots more on tap before the fair opens too, naturally. We're back tomorrow with a double photography edition from a very recent Hot Shot, a fitting edition for a week that also includes the deadline for this year's first edition of the competition. The deadline for Hey, Hot Shot! is this Friday, so if you're thinking about how to get YOUR photography on the radar, there's no time like the present.
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