Jason P Grisell
The Ladder of Divine Ascent. At Neighbors_Chinatown NYC. July 5, 2023-July 14, 2023.
Jason P. Grisell is a California born, New York City based American artist. He works in the mediums of painting, sculpture, drawing, film, music, assemblage, writing, and performance. From 2002 to 2009 he completed an Ubi Sunt/Momento Mori project entitled The Burial Project that culminated in the burial of more than 117 paintings and artworks, undertaken in vacant lots and public spaces throughout New York City. Many of the artworks are now covered and entombed under gentrification area land developments, which in the proceeding years have themselves oftentimes fallen into sharp decay and depreciation. The current show The Ladder Of Divine Ascent, presented @neighbors_chinatown, is an exploration and updating of the traditions of the flaneur, plein air painting and artmaking process, social values, the overlapping derelictions and revitalizations of secularization and religion, the subsequent repetition of denials towards mysteries, spiritual and supernatural realities, and failures of language. It is also the artist’s ongoing inquiry into the concept of Ubi Sunt, the rhetorical question taken from the Latin “Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?”, meaning "Where are those who were before us?" Sometimes mistaken to mean nostalgia, the ubi sunt question is actually a reflection and meditation on mortality and life's ephemeral aspects and transience. A number of the paintings on display are a continuance of the Ghost Paintings series that was started circa 2003 in response to thematic inspiration of zen ensō circle painting. The new work is all created outdoors, mostly in the post-industrial Superfund areas of New York City that are ignored and avoided, where ideas are considered and inspiration found in the transit of drifting urban night time walks. The title of the show is a nod and homage to the book The Ladder of Divine Ascent, a work written circa 600 AD in the Sainai, Egypt Raithu Monastery by Saint John “of the Ladder” Climacus. The book, a key text of monasticism in early Christianity and Eastern Orthodoxy, today is unknown and forgotten by the vast majority of practicing Christians in the Western hemisphere, yet it has the unique distinction of being the first book printed in the America’s, in Mexico in 1537. The book stands as a thematic guide and inspiration for the production of the artworks currently presented at Neighbors_Chinatown, with a piece completed for each rung of the 30 rung scala or ladder. The Ladder of Divine Ascent is up for a brief ten day presentation that is to be followed by a curatorial effort organized by Jason P. Grisell that will examine and present NYC from the perspective and works of the NYC Department of Sanitation aligned artists @kickhisasscbass, @stoishere, and @minivanboy666. Opening on July 15, 2023.
