VISITOR

I am fascinated by systems and parallels within art and sports. People often learn major life lessons thru sports; among those lessons are rules, conflict, collective action, democracy, fairness, morality, ambition, circumstance, and hierarchy. In my series dealing with sports (mostly basketball), I paint marks and forms that correspond with actions and symbols found in basketball including brackets, suicide running drills, strategic play formations, trophies, and so on. Part of why I choose to paint with oil on canvas is because each rectangle is like a court or field where there are specific rules, logic, and history. The studio is like an arena where unscripted drama can take place.

In the “passing memory” series, I attempt to commit important events in my life to memory via painting. Each gradient is a vignette of an experience or place. I meditate over photos I’ve taken/have been tagged in on social media. I also mine color purely from memory. Cold wax and oil paint are swiped across the canvas to conceal extraneous possibilities and to limit sentimentality. A thin trace of landscape is revealed. Skin tones, days at the beach, climbing a mountain with a lover, my parents’ backyard, a city sidewalk. Color triggers these recollections.

Roberto Jamora

Roberto Jamora was born in 1987 in Annapolis, MD and grew up in Virginia Beach, VA. He lives lives in Queens and works in Brooklyn. He has a BFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University and a MFA in Visual Arts from Purchase College, State University of New York (SUNY). He was an Emerging Artist-Teacher Fellow at Joan Mitchell Foundation and also taught at Purchase College, SUNY. He was a 2014 NY Emerging Artist Grant Nominee at the Rema Hort Mann Foundation. Previously, he has participated in artist residencies at Ragdale and Sambalikhaan. In Fall 2017, he will be an Artist-in- Residence at the Joan Mitchell Foundation in New Orleans, LA. His work has been included in exhibitions at Scott Charmin Gallery, Fouladi Projects, The Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelly Foundation, Open Space, and ArtHelix.

Website: robertojamora.com