JIMI GLEASON: VAPOR WAVE - Opening Tomorrow, Saturday, April 5, 5-8PM

Santa Monica, CA - William Turner Gallery is pleased to present Vapor Wave, a solo exhibition by Jimi Gleason,  opening April 5 and running through May 31, 2025.

Vapor Wave is Jimi Gleason’s most ambitious body of work to date. Utilizing a rich vocabulary of materials and styles, Gleason has built up gossamer thin layers of iridescent paint to create a series of paintings that are engagingly enigmatic. They confirm an artist at the height of his talent, confidently exploring the power of nuance and understated expression.

In this new series, vaporous ribbons of color play across lustrous surfaces that morph and shift as one engages them. The effect elicits a sense of unexpected revelry - much like the kind one might experience gazing across a lake in a predawn moment, captivated by the growing light as it caresses and undulates across the water’s surface.

And like water, Gleason’s surfaces are quietly in motion, their iridescent paints subtly shifting in hue as light plays across them. In some of the canvases, sharp diagonals bifurcate the compositions, providing dramatic structural rifts to these ethereal surfaces. The effect is a hypnotic and prismatic visual structure, where light, color and form intersect in ever-changing play. Gleason has a uniquely personal connection to water: he grew up surfing, and took up rowing in college. When he talks about his work he also talks about, “the way the light looks underwater,” and early mornings rowing when the calm water reflects the sky at dawn. 

Like many artists working in the Light and Space arena, materials and their catalytic visual effects are essential to their work. In Gleason’s case, he employs silver nitrate and pearlescent paints to activate his surfaces, which catch and reflect surrounding light, further engaging one’s sense of the surrounding space. Gleason is a leader in that next generation of Southern California artists to work in the Light and Space ethos, carrying the dialogue forward and using his work of art to explore the phenomenological properties of perception.

Born in Newport Beach, CA, Gleason received his BA from UC Berkeley in 1985. He studied printmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute before relocating to New York City, where he worked as a photo assistant and technician. Returning to California, Gleason was employed in the studio of Ed Moses for five years. Combining the disparate technical and compositional skills developed during his exposure to printmaking, photography and mixed media painting, Gleason is now the subject of considerable curatorial and critical attention. 

Gleason’s work is exhibited in significant public institutions, including the Hammer Museum, the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation, the Long Beach Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Tucson Museum of Art.The artist’s paintings are actively collected by a growing number of major public and private collections around the world.

Jimi Gleason: Alchemy - From Silver Bullion to Works of Art

A native of Newport Beach, Jimi Gleason attended Orange Coast College for its strong rowing team, later transferring to UC Berkeley. In his senior year, he discovered ceramics and printmaking, taking Zen-like satisfaction in pulling ink across surfaces. He graduated with a BA in Fine Art in 1985.  After a brief stint at the San Francisco Art Institute, Jimi moved to New York City, where he lived the life of an experimental painter while working as a photo assistant and photo technician.  Upon returning to California, he worked as a studio assistant for renowned abstractionist, Ed Moses.

Jimi Gleason has spent his career exploring the reflective possibilities of a painterly surface. “By using iridescent and silver nitrate surface coats, I have managed to create visual spaces that respond to both the play of light and the location of the viewer,” he says. Mixing nontraditional materials such as silver deposit with acrylic paints, Gleason’s surfaces are highly reactive to light and shifts in the viewer’s position. Rather than focusing on the surface as an end in itself, his paintings track the play of light and the movement of the viewer, thereby acting as a mirror onto the external world. Through this interaction, Gleason hopes to induce a meditative experience for his viewers.

The silver nitrate paintings begin with a solid bar of silver, that is dissolved in concentrated nitric acid.   Once the nitric acid has evaporated Jimi is left with silver nitrate (a solid).  This element is then mixed with sodium hydroxide to create silver oxide which is dissolved in ammonium to create a compound that can be applied to the surface of the canvas.   This complicated and pricey technique produces paintings that are unique in both process and beauty.