Thomas Erben is pleased to present the first solo show of New York based painter Jason Eberspeaker, a 2006 graduate from Yale’s MFA program. A very strong, promising artist, we have followed his work over the past three years and have been increasingly thrilled with expectation and excitement.

The title of the exhibition, This Jackie, is a deliberately opaque reference to no one particular object. The title could have just as well been a That Jackie. The cryptic Jackie is absent from the show but nevertheless it serves as a key. The postcard invitation puckishly sets the stage for Eberspeaker’s show. The image, a scene from Erick von Stroheim’s The Wedding March,’ is straightforward enough, but buried in the reference is the implication of the privileged “eye” of the voyeur or perhaps more accurately, the auteur. The supreme editor is not only privy to secret, staged orgies, viewed through peepholes or recorded through lenses onto film and left on the cutting floor unseen and forgotten, he is the gatekeeper too to what we imagine we see.

For this show, the artist, literally and continuously, unmakes one show into another by a, nomadic undoing of the images and objects that serve as source materials for the individual works. The exhibition displaced becomes the heart of the work in toto. The elusiveness of individual works are pronounced and only become as familiar as traces of Eberspeaker’s comings and goings from the gallery allow.

Much like a distraction during conversation, the resulting retardation of an exchange in communication is what gives form to Eberspeaker’s nearly-object-like paintings, and sculptures and the impetus that reveals a personal narrative throughout. Eberspeaker seeks to draw out themes from the improvised narratives that result from his attempts to catch the effervescent Temporary Memory before it dissipates. He thinks in modes of “dream-pop,” trading and making connections intuitively between the impulses of his personal imagination and the collective, commercial vision.

Previously, Eberspeaker’s work was successfully included in An Inch of Truth, a group show at the gallery (Fall 2006). He has also participated in exhibitions at Yale University and in Smoke and Mirrors at China Art Objects, Los Angeles (2006). He was born in The Commonwealth of Virgina., and grew up on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic.

In the project space, Oakland based Paul Schiek exhibits photo works, collectively titled “Holes and Halos”, his first East Coast appearance.

Shot in b/w, the actual making of the images is not as important to Schiek as is their editing and sequencing, which often results in the placement of several images on one sheet. Viewed together, their installation creates a blanketing effect that runs the spectrum of human emotions. Recurrent motifs are anthropomorphized trees, physical interactions, water and, generally, the tension between light and dark. In this language of opposites, Schiek finds the building blocks of a practical truth; a reminder that all life follows the same path: genesis of form then decay, and, in between, seemingly random alternation between isolation and community. In fact, at the opening, in order to further his constructive sense of human association, Schiek plans to make available newsprints with images of his work so that everyone can take home a tangible work of art.