JTT is proud to announce its first solo exhibition with New York based artist Cole Sayer (b.1984 Nashville,TN).

Artist Statement:

I like this argument that’s taking place in sports right now around the use of performance enhancement. The ban on steroids, certain fabrics, and inevitably prosthetics goes beyond regulating a level playing field. Rather, it gives definition to the dividing line between natural and synthetic, ontologically enforcing a staid definition of what it means to be human. It’s like the old dialogue of what is art, before legalizing steroids in the art world a long time ago and blowing the roof off the house.

I want to give form to the limitless promise of the upgrade, how the newest version will always surpass the old. Walking into an art store is no different than walking into the Footlocker. The state-of-the-art supplies echo the guarantee of the latest moisture wicking, light weight, energy efficient sneaker; the promise to make you run faster and jump higher than ever before. Only in small increments though, Olympic athletes train their entire lives to improve the one hundred yard dash by a fraction of a second. There’s a really nice fatalistic poetry to that.

The sculptures and paintings in …like we said we would are not made any differently than how one intuitively makes a sculpture or painting. Material is manipulated, bent, and squeezed. I make a mark on the canvas and then step back, look at it, and make another move. It’s that same techno influenced, self aware formalism that shows you surf the Internet, just performance enhanced by whatever weird plasticky product was newly released. The aesthetics of gradients, texture mapping, and polygons bare a kind of optimism for progress. The work mimes the façade of technology that becomes an ergonomic mirror of the desires of its host, revealing the competitive elephant in the room. It offers the world but barely moves even a millionth of an inch. — 2012