Jaime Molina & Michael Gallegos

February 4 - February 25, 2011

Illiterate welcomes Jaime Molina and Michael Gallegos for a dual show of individual works. While each artist retains a unique style, each stretches line, color and their own imaginations to create exaggerated characters with personalities to match their distorted forms.

JAIME MOLINA

While Jamie Molina received a degree in printmaking at Metro State College of Denver, drawing and painting were the initial vehicles for his artistic development and continue to remain highly utilized methods in his work. Influenced heavily by graffiti, Molina is an outsider in this world of outcasts. Having developed his technique in an isolated environment largely without the support of other artists, he sites a difficulty identifying himself as part of a culture often defined by the relationships within it, for better or worse. Within his work Molina turns this sense of otherness into the parameters for a darkly humorous landscape and its illustrated inhabitants. Separated by the psychological schism between inclinations to act out comic folly and simple piety, Molina’s caricatures reflect the seemingly inescapable social system of identifying people in groups defined by shared vices and virtues. In addition to his flat works, Molina extrudes these polarized personalities into physical space. Crafted from wood and found objects, his puppets creations -- often with pulley-operated limbs that when activated exacerbate the character’s vulnerabilities -- present morbid curiosity as catalyst for human action. The artist presents the string attached to a finger. The question is, who can resist the urge to pull it?


MICHAEL GALLEGOS

An autodidactic, Michael Gallegos discovered art when he looked out the window of his father’s car. A native of Fort, Collins Colorado, he encountered urban art for the first time on a family road trip to California. Nearly a decade and a half later, his fascination with illicit letters and characters has developed from his neighborhood bridges and back alleys to exhibitions across the country. In his indoor paintings, Gallegos retains the bold, expressive motions of graffiti with reference to it’s embossed letterforms and characters, while building layers over time beyond what can be accomplished looking over your shoulder with a can of spray paint. For nearly as long as he’s been on the streets painting, Gallegos has worked in the family’s trash collecting business. His time spent with the refuse of a city may help to explain what the artist means when he says that his images contain “objects that keep us alive”. The organic elements found in nature along with the manufactured environments of an industry driven civilization appear side-by-side. In his latest body of work, increasing elements of anxiety appear as the recurring half-lidded eye of apathy repeatedly hovers above listlessly surveying the collision of these two worlds it has helped to fuse.