A Trillion Verses
October 20 - December 30, 2023
Jakob Dwight was born in Mobile, Alabama. His mother is a doctor of speech pathology and his father is a computer scientist. His early interest in art was influenced by the pottery his mother collected.
Dwight has exhibited nationally and internationally since the mid 2000s, presenting work in group shows in New York and Atlanta in the United States, and Salzburg and Vienna, Austria. In the early 2010s his work was featured in Berlin and Kassel, Germany, and in Los Angeles and New York (where he participated in the New York Electronic Arts Festival in 2013).
His work was included in the 2015 exhibition Disguise: Masks and Global African Art which was organized by the Seattle Art Museum and traveled to the Fowler Museum at UCLA in Los Angeles later that year and to the Brooklyn Museum in 2016. Dwight’s works feature on the front and back covers of the exhibition catalog.
Dwight has since shown with 50Golborne Gallery in London, New York, and Paris, and in the group exhibition Digital Combines at Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles. He is represented by Maus Contemporary in Birmingham, Alabama.
Most recently, Dwight contributed an essay to the catalog for Thornton Dial: I Too Am Alabama in 2022 and talked about his work with fellow Alabama artist Richard Dial in an online discussion hosted by the Wiregrass Museum of Art during the exhibition I, Too, Am Thornton Dial. New paintings were included in a group show titled Anyone Can Move A Mountain at Maus Contemporary in Birmingham, which featured artwork by all the artist contributors to the Thornton Dial catalog. That exhibition led directly to Dwight’s first Alabama solo exhibition, Various Analysands, also at Maus Contemporary earlier this year. A Trillion Verses is curated by Paul Barrett, and marks Dwight’s first solo museum exhibition in Alabama.
Jakob Dwight says of his upcoming exhibition at the Wiregrass Museum of Art:
“A Trillion Verses is an ode to the evolution of naturalism and structured human observation (better known as science) from the first human beings to now, visual letters through time to the first artists and observers…an offering to the Human Superorganism, evolutionary biology’s description of our being a hive species, innately and ultimately for one another.
“A Trillion Verses references scale, complexity, and the difficulty in truly understanding the immensity of things – time, geology, space and celestial bodies, distances, populations, the human genome for instance.
“Additionally, the works in the show mark a return to my training in painting after spending the last 24 years as a digital artist. So the title also refers to the lines of code beneath the thousands of images that were created through generative processes over the years, but ultimately ending in my resuming analog and ancient mark-making in the forms of drawing and painting. This shift coincides with many of us in society beginning to rethink how useful digital life continues to be for our daily lives.”
Exhibition curator Paul Barrett says:
“Having worked with Jakob Dwight and the Wiregrass Museum of Art before, it’s exciting to bring this body of work to Dothan. Jakob is an intensely intellectual artist and incorporates a deep appreciation and understanding of science and philosophy into his work–without sacrificing a casual viewer’s capacity to enjoy the aesthetics of a beautifully rendered painting or drawing. The artworks in this exhibition expand on a body of work that’s very new to Jakob’s practice in terms of execution, but conceptually continue thought processes that have been present in his work for years. I hope visitors to the museum will appreciate his process and attention to detail in reimagining computer-influenced patterns with old school methods that date back centuries as a poetic statement on the interconnectedness of all things and all people.”