JAMIE GECKER - NEW YORK.USA

13 NOVEMBER 2009

Written by TRAVIS LEE STREET

Blaise Photo transfer and latex paint on canvas [2007]               

    I first came across Jamie Gecker in my ever lusting search for new and wonderful ways in which to manipulate Polaroids. And in my research I've stumbled upon a 'Valley of the Dolls' artistic wonderland. Photographer, painter, sculpturist and Polaroid destroyer, Gecker has manipulated the 1970s disco-era iconography into something palatable and pleasing to the senses.
 

Ernestine Polaroid collage[2007]               

I'll admit it, at first I was jealous and a little sore that Gecker was practicing the same craft that I thought I had pioneered (the sacred art of Polaroid manipulation). But in diving into her work, especially the most recent, I have come to find a wholly new understanding and fondness for what she does. She is certainly an artist that doesn't sit on her haunches. Ever evolving, ever transmographing, she takes that next step and fills that void that resides in all of us that says "keep going... you're almost there."  
 

Blaise-o  Photo laminate and mixed media on painted plywood [2009]               

Visually, Gecker's work plays on vivid colors and substantiates the emotions these colors elicit by incorporating Mid-West popular culture imagery that most of us have purveyed in our memories as times of safety, nuclear  families and our parents. But her work goes beyond that and tears down these imagined past realities and exposes them for what they really are; pastiches of Hollywood nostalgia and Coca-cola adverts.     

Geode2 [2007]               

But whereas the beauty is not always inherent in the beast, Gecker comes to a cease-fire of past and present, real and fictive. Her constructs remind us that the past isn't static, but always up for reinterpretation.

Anita [2007]               

http://jaimegecker.com/