Rolling the suspended vagaries of suburban childhood in with the indelible language of contemporary American anxiety, Aaron Elvis Jupin’s paintings and drawings communicate in an amplified whisper. Visual association, coded pun, and encrypted self-reference form the basis of a practice suggesting that memory owes as much to absorption as experience. Observational and inventive in equal measure, Jupin’s compositional strategy involves combing the internet in search of images to stretch, fold, and repurpose into pictures whose strange familiarity belies their assiduous strangeness. Informed early by an uncle’s career as an animator, Jupin’s approach to picture-making benefits from a specific personal association with classic animation strategies–this comes through in glancing references and subtly evocative motifs that serve to imply motion and depth, like focal distance, forced perspective, and blur. 

In Jupin’s paintings, sculptures, and drawings masks appear as a recurring trope; they stand in as compelling symbols that transcend historical roots to embody a spectrum of meanings and interpretations. Across contexts, masks serve as liminal spaces, blurring the boundaries between reality and illusion, concealment and revelation. Jupin uses the mask as a means to backdoor into figuration, harnessing its ambiguity to explore themes of identity, obfuscation, and the interplay between fact and fiction. From the  practice of Mike Kelley, the photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard and Cindy Sherman, the films of Paul McCarthy, and the paintings of James Ensor to the funerary rites of ancient Egypt and the movie that helped launch Jim Carey’s career, masks have forever served as a deep probe into far off corners of the mind.

Jupin questions the Platonic function of his own likeness within the world he’s built from the imagery of other horrific worlds. Perhaps his own image is another trope yet to be discovered. Alternatively, as a sign with less obvious psychological implications, perhaps his presence indicates that he is more than simply an omniscient storyteller or the hand that executes each vignette. Perhaps the artist is also the monster—that which, more so than the other used and reused imagery presented in this selection, must still be determined and understood within the ongoing narrative of Jupin’s oeuvre.

-Excerpt of Seven Paintings and a House Façade exhibition text by Christie Hayden