OPENING THIS FRIDAY FEBRUARY 21ST from 5PM-9PM
The exhibition continues Saturday February 22nd, Thursday February 27th- Saturday March 1st from 3PM- 7PM.
UGLY MAGIC is a conjuring: the magical practice of cajoling imagery from the depths of one's psyche. In this way, Zimmerman's works can be seen as a shamanic-self healing, visionary and divining while reflecting the past. The artist walks within the liminal space of the waking and dreams, between the past and the future, and the real and unreal. Zimmerman often uses humor as his language of choice- making relatable what is often opaque within traditional art world presentation. Pop imagery is pulled from the artist's pantheon; utilizing visions with a horror-edged slant, personal notations and teen culture mashups.
The gallery will be filled with over 300 drawings and paintings; an imaginarium of exploration into the daily ritual of this talented artist's practice.
Zimmerman will also be releasing the accompanying book UGLY MAGIC at the gallery Opening, with signed copies available, as well as copies of his previous book GBTR available for sale.
We hope you can join us for this very special exhibition.
To see more work by Aaron Zimmerman
https://www.instagram.com/aaronzeem/
And please follow 14BC@
https://www.instagram.com/14bcgallery/
Artist Statement
“Ugly Magic is an exhibition that brings into focus the stuff I manage to eke out when I am exhausted, fucked up, exasperated and my inner critic is getting the best of me. It celebrates about-faces, side quests, cringe worthy moments, aimless play, times of creative gestation when I have nothing in mind and just want to let it all come to me. The title Ugly Magic comes from a sentence in the John Darnielle ( @monsterhat ) novel Wolf in White Van. “The world is a place full of ugly magic.”
Started as a daily drawing practice in 2015, I’ve made over 600 drawings and paintings and counting in this vein. Around 300 pieces made over the course of the last 10 years will be on view at 14BC Gallery. They are grouped, sequenced and separated into sections in a way that made intuitive sense to me as I worked on them on and off for many years. There are threads that weave through all my previous bodies of work to this exhibition’s material. Dark, juvenile humor, the profane, horror film imagery, metal music inspired pictures, the Gothic, the scatological, abstraction, the pitfalls of masculinity, Appalachian pathos, comics, cartoons, death, a certain dare to be stupid attitude, etc.
If I may speak symbolically, I can say that I am using the divinatory instruments of drawing and painting to perform a taciturn seance that casts a visual hex powered by the witch’s cauldron of the self. And Ugly Magic is my Necronomicon.”