Gallery One Sixty Presents a Feast of Wonderfully Strange Work by Cle Artist Jake Kelly

JakeKelly

 

Fri 9/4 @ 6PM

Cleveland artist Jake Kelly first attracted notice with his flyers for concerts at venues like the Grog Shop and the Beachland, which started appearing around town 15 years ago.

His intricate line drawings, looking like single panels pulled from a comic strip, appeared to depict moments from a larger narrative that was titillatingly elusive. Sometimes it had something — usually tenuous — to do with the band in question but often it was its own thing, telling some unsettling, often macabre tale whose backstory you had to fill in yourself.

The self-taught but hard-working and highly productive artist quickly developed other outlets for his work. He does murals and posters for Melt Bar and Grilled, whose punk-based aesthetic matched his own. He puts out zines and created the horror comic series the Lake Erie Monster. In 2010, he did a show at Heights Arts with John G, a fellow Cleveland flyer/poster artist with a similar underground aesthetic.

But it’s been ten years since he’s had a solo show; his last, Mysteries of the Unknown, was at the now-closed Visible Voice Books in Tremont in 2005. So he’s overdue for the showcase A Heavy, Humid World, which opens at Gallery One Sixty on Waterloo with a reception Fri 9/4 during Walk All Over Waterloo.

“About a year ago, he mentioned wanting to have a show,” says Gallery On Sixty owner Bryon Miller. “He hasn’t had a show in a while. We were hanging out and he said, I want to do a show. He’s busy; he has a lot of stuff going on. He’s doing the Melt murals and when he gets one of those, you don’t see him for six months. But he’s had time to do the show and he’s been working on it for about half a year.”

It will give longtime fans of Kelly’ work as well as newcomers the opportunity to immerse themselves in it. The spacious two-room gallery will be packed with Kelly’s work, both two-dimensional and three-dimensional. It will include paintings and works on paper, as well as a newer thing he’s been doing: painting on secondhand furniture, turning drab end tables into colorful works of art.

“It’s all new; that’s what’s great about it,” says Miller of the work. “He gets on these kicks of staying up for days and days and working. He has a brand new seven-foot painting. It’s mind-blowing. He’s definitely going to melt some brains when people see his work. His level of production is insane. It’s work like I don’t think I’ve ever seen come out of him. It’s a little more risqué. I think he’s putting himself out there with this work.”

In the promotion for the show, he describes it this way: “The Symbionese Liberation Army rubs shoulders with psychedelic monsters. Pornographic actresses wield strange, centipede-like creatures. Scientology Auditors have LSD freak-outs and go fully external for major wins. Drunks cavort in dry riverbeds. Jaded teens make plans to burn down the high school. It’s an eye-gouging mash-up of hardcore porno and late-night diner food, poorly made bombs and good drugs.”

Sound intriguing? It is. The strange details in Kelly’s pieces could kept a viewer engrossed for days.

In addition to the original pieces, Kelly will have a limited-edition 420-page book on sale called “FLIERS: 2000-2015,” collecting some of his most outstanding flyers of the past 15 years.

“It came out really great,” says Miller. “It’s a cool book because if you’re from Cleveland and go to a lot of shows, you can thumb through and go, I was at that show. It’s cool to see Jake’s progression of his style of illustration. You can see the changes in his work over the years.”

The reception will be a party with refreshments and music by DJ Hovaround. The show runs through the end of October.

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