Harman Projects is pleased to present A creature having a dream about himself, a solo exhibition by artist Jason Jägel. The exhibition marks Jägel’s debut solo exhibition with Harman Projects.

In A creature having a dream about himself, Jason Jägel’s paintings depict auto-biographical fictional worlds where anything can happen. Through bold layered applications of color, lines, figures, and writing, each piece presents a place with its own inner life and possibilities, reflecting the artist’s selfhood and subconsciousness.

Of the exhibition title, he shares: “A creature having a dream about himself is the caption written by my mother on a drawing I made at 3 years old. The drawing depicts a person whose form contains another person, both all body with face features and stick appendages. Today I am still asking the same questions of belonging and connection. The creature’s dream celldivides himself, becoming two from one. It acknowledges an interbeing of identity. In studio practice is an opportunity to find a self unconditioned, connected to the wholeness of life.”

In Curtains! soft pastel-colored brushstrokes evoke a dreamy state. At center, a head is turned to face a slightly undefined character, appearing to exchange whispers behind paper sheets. Throughout the composition, figures emerge in various states of being. This sense of perpetual mutability is largely shaped by the artist’s practice in which intuition and improvisation give way to storytelling, where meaning and language are fluid and a greater world is implied.

Jägel’s visual vernacular is one that conjures a sense of intimacy, interconnectedness— supplanting and teleporting from image to image within a field, through strung-together riddlelike texts and swatches of color that can lead the viewer in any given direction at their own discretion. Through navigating this language of images and colors infused with emotions, the viewer is invited to enter into an echo chamber where their perception melds with the artist’s authorship to form a new narrative built upon finding the various forms of self within the works.