August 7 to September 12, 2021

Ampersand is pleased to present City Paintings, an exhibition of new work by Japeth Mennes. Though he studied painting, Japeth notes this is the first time he has used the medium exclusively in the traditional sense for a focused body of work. “Painting was always in my orbit of art making,” he adds, “but most of my work prior to this was on paper—or videos, sculpture and photographic experiments with paint.” He also works as a musician and spent most of the past five years on what he calls a visual art hiatus, writing and performing music with the experimental rock group, Dead Painters. His return to visual making started with photography and paintings of abstracted washing machines. “I spend a lot of time walking around my neighborhood here in Queens, New York,” he says, “taking figureless pictures with my little 35mm film camera (think Stephen Shore and Luigi Ghirri). Laundromats are everywhere and each one has its own unique way of depicting the washing machine with an illustration on their storefront awnings. Once I started noticing and photographing the signs, I was struck by how lovely many of them were and how similar they are to modernist paintings—almost slipping into abstraction and purely formal. Super simple: a circle within a square, color and shape.” Japeth uses an amalgamation of a few different photographed signs and tweaks them subtly from one painting to the next. He emphasizes that the focus is a 1:1 ratio with the sign, rather than an actual laundry machine as object. Installed in a row, however, the paintings come back together and allude to what we all might recognize as the inside of a laundromat. The paintings also have an uncanny resemblance to the front face of a camera—aperture, view finder and perhaps a flash—and thereby circle back to the root of their creation. Or, separated from the story of their making altogether, they are paintings about color, meditative and incredibly pleasing to look at and be around. This notion is supported by the secondary titles for each painting—a simple list of colors—and further by Japeth’s stated aspiration to “make art that pushes back against traditional modes of self expression and authorship.” His paintings of apartment mailboxes and intercoms in his neighborhood function in a similar way. “I think I find the objects compelling not only for their slippery abstract and formal qualities,” he says, “but also because they are somewhat figurative without being figurative whatsoever. They imply a story without telling one. The washing machine being this container that you load-up with a vestige of your body. The mailboxes and intercoms—each little box and buzzer representing a different person.” In an indirect way, then, the paintings might also be about people, how we move about, engage and interact with the surroundings of our neighborhoods—sometimes abstractedly, with or without intention, often anonymous. How we live within our cities.

Japeth Mennes lives and works in New York City. He received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and his BFA from Kansas City Art Institute. Also a musician, Mennes was a member of the experimental rock group, Dead Painters, from 2012 to 2018. City Paintings is his first exhibition at Ampersand.