Jesse Morgan Barnett Exhibition

Marty Walker Gallery presents Tour, an exhibition of new photographs and video by Dallas-based artist 
Jesse Morgan Barnett from his series To Accident and Abandon Such Customary Writings. Large-scale inkjet prints and a video follow highway road medians, documenting tire burns that appear not unlike giant brushstrokes in the moving landscape, while simultaneously dramatizing the often unnoticed relationship between cinematic experiences and automobiles as a means of viewing American landscape.

Despite the disturbingly simplistic and static scenes, the indicated actions are wildly animated, activated by imagination and nostalgic individual experience. Inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s theory of the decisive moment, Barnett instead presents a fossilized memory rather than instantaneously capturing a specific moment. In the words of the artist, “As attention shifts to the spectacle in the periphery, images of automobiles having touched concrete barrier walls emerge. These markers are passed and require a circling back. The photographs has become and aftermath of an aftermath, an aestheticized punctuation to a violent decrease in speed.”

Featured in the Video Room is Ward (v4), a 32-minute video by Barnett derived from 16 miles of road leading to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. Footage of dirt roads playing off the effects of changing water levels forces the experience of opposing states of paralysis with views that seem to lead nowhere, despite always being in a state of perpetual motion. These subtle and limited views quietly contemplate philosophies of time, age, existence, and dimension.

Jesse Morgan Barnett works in Dallas and creates sculpture, video, and photography. Barnett holds an MFA and BFA from UT Arlington and has been gaining attention since his graduation in 2011. Recently Barnett’s sculptures were exhibited in a group show entitled …painting is a philosophical endeavor, duh! at Oliver Francis Gallery in Dallas, TX. Barnett was also one of 100 artists from 32 countries selected for Arles Photography Open Salon’s exceptional exhibition Transience at Alliance Française in Penang, Malaysia earlier this year. His work has been widely exhibited across the nation as well as internationally in France, Italy, Wales, and Japan.