Jamie Panzer, Lyrical Space
July, 5 - August 8, 2022
After taking a hiatus in his practice to travel internationally, cross-disciplinary artist Jamie Panzer makes his return in his solo exhibition, Lyrical Space, at Spellerberg Projects. Born in New York City and raised in Maryland, Panzer has exhibited in major cities across the country while living in Austin for the last 20 years. After leaving Austin to travel abroad, Panzer is now based in Maryland. Lyrical Space displays mixed media work that Panzer began creating while living in Mexico during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Lyrical Space reflects Panzer’s ongoing interest in recycling and rearranging found materials collected from his surroundings. The featured works combine paint and collage, appropriating commercial packaging, old textbooks, and other media to create new forms and compositional relationships that blur familiar imagery and abstract illusions. The resulting reconstructions are playful and suggestive, encouraging viewers to engage with them imaginatively while pulling from mental semiotic encyclopedias.
The featured works’ ambiguity also reflects the social and political contexts of their origin. Whereas Panzer’s previous bodies of work have manifested preconceived visual aesthetics or ideas, his newest works arise out of improvisation and reaction to global events taking place in 2020, the years that have followed, and today. Panzer’s appropriation of found media provokes a sense of uncertainty, demonstrating how the artist navigates today’s social currents by incorporating cultural discards.
Photographs by Laurel Coyle