Gallery Photos by Ricardo Adame

Darby Jack
GUNK!

Darby Jack is a visual artist, musician, and radiocaster whose recent series of drawings and paintings derive their inspiration from the abundant debris which litters their adopted home, Chicago. GUNK! features a collection of complex hand-drawn landscapes of jagged waste and impossible oceans of rhythmic debris that encourage playful discovery and considers the unexpected beauty in the remnant of human activity.

The Birmingham-born artist’s “trash paintings”, are part of a larger ongoing preoccupation with the city's discarded waste that took hold during the early months of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. As self-isolation mandates and quarantines shuttered the artists shared studio, they found themselves spending an inordinate amount of time traversing the now de-populated city streets. Devoid of people, one might find the urban landscape blearily empty. Instead, the artist discovered it was teeming with trash, waste, and a copious quantity of discarded objects left out or thrown out by sheltering humans.

“Someone once repeated the quote to me, about how you will learn a lot about a person by what's in their trash, what they throw away. Trash [becomes] some of the most real reflections of the people who discarded it and a reflection of the particular place that you are in.” 

Darby Jack began to photograph the strangest and most amusing finds they encountered on their daily walks, archiving them through various projects including @mystery_liquid_chi, an Instagram account dedicated to photos of disgusting, unidentifiable substances on the streets of Chicago; and Walking Music, a weekly radio show featuring a rotating playlist of lesser-appreciated and eclectic tracks overlaid with recordings of spontaneous noises and conversations captured by a discrete hand-held recorder buried within the artist’s pocket.

Gunk! presents a selection of paintings, drawings, and a site-specific installation, each rendered meticulously in tightly coiled lines and cross-hatched forms. The trash piles are the result of long sessions of meditative improvised drawing which focuses the artist’s self-described “over-stimulated” attention span. As a classically trained jazz guitarist, the methods and theory of musical improvisation exerts a significant influence on the artist’s practice of spontaneous compositions. Drawing particular inspiration from the frenetic energy of post-punk and notational complexity of math-rock.

The artist’s densely layered piles compel the viewer’s undivided attention, as they attempt to seek out the immediate most identifiable objects. While some are real, based on photographs taken by the artist, most are not. Fictionalized objects which may deceptively resemble real-life counterparts, only to confound the viewer with some strange contraption or absurd attachment. This process of exploration and joyful discovery is the artist’s ultimate goal, especially as it relates to a renewed appreciation for the beauty in what mass consumer culture would rather we not focus our attention on: the waste and decay wrought by human activity. This aligns closely with perhaps Darby Jack’s greatest influence, the Situationist International, a group of leftist artists and activists whose practices were designed to unsettle and disrupt the systems of consumerist homogeneity.

As subjects navigate a constructed urban landscape designed to orient the moment of people and goods in an efficient manner, the mere act of wandering without a determined end-destination can become a political gesture which subverts the daily forces of capitalist pressures. Rather than deal in cultural pessimism, Darby Jack’s Trash series occupies a jovial stance which encourages individual political agency, collective experiences, and the reappraisal of what objects society deems worthy of aesthetic appreciation or dismissal.

Sheridyn Villarreal,
Visual Arts Curator

Darby Jack is a visual artist and musician from Birmingham, Alabama, and currently based in Chicago, Illinois. They received their BFA in Fine Art from Columbia College Chicago in May 2022. Darby Jack has previously participated in exhibitions at Gallery Vox, and the Epiphany Arts Center and is the host of Walking Music, a weekly radio show hosted by Substrate Radio.

darbyjack.com // @darbyjacc