Bryan Jernigan, Artist

Abstraction
 

The Sound of Line

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Artist Statement:

The Sound of Line is about my life and experiences coming from a rural place, but living in an urban area for 35 years. I live and work in metropolitan Washington, D.C., and in that time, I have unconsciously and consciously absorbed my city’s objective realities – traffic jams, order in chaos, inequities around me - but also the feelings associated with urban spaces:  gritty streets, the necessity of being able to rely on oneself, the shared decay and gleaming brilliance of mundane structures and national monuments. I often see electrical wires as not only a physical representation of what they are, but also of the myriad communications they house and the conceptual connections they provide. And these days, the physical wires may have all but disappeared, but the communications in the “cloud” around us is both ephemeral and very much real. Strangers connected. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, there is a "sporty" aspect to the lines in my work that recalls colorful stripes on tennis shoes, knee-high cotton socks and are seen reinvented in today’s fashion. However, the lines and stripes I would hope could also be seen as the various cultures that find themselves living with, mixing with and networking with each other in an urban setting. The nation’s capital is, at its very foundation, a city built on networking, transience and constant change, so my pieces include “pentimenti” – traces or layers of lines that came before - as an embodiment of that concept. The Sound of Line represents the lives of so many who come to this place and make their mark before leaving or being replaced by someone new who’s intent on carving a place for themselves. People come and go, and the city remains, ever-changed by those who’ve lived within it.