Bio
Jeremy Tarr is a contemporary artist whose work crosses the disciplines of performance, video, sculpture, painting, and photography; dealing with post-industrial settings, their decay and abandonment and the new narratives that emerge from within and are constructed around them.
Born in 1989, he was raised in the working class neighborhoods of Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. He received his MFA in Studio Art at Syracuse University. In 2017 he received an Artist-in-Residency Fellowship where he lived in Berlin, Germany and had a studio at the Axel Haubrok Fahrbereitschaft Collection.
Places of abandonment-alleyways, vacant houses, derelict properties are my sights of reckoning and liberation. These forgotten places, like that of the strip of wooded dumping ground of my childhood are the platform for rethinking and re-imaging the world. Free from purpose, laws, rules, and constraint they are the sight where new mythologies and cosmologies are conjured and ghosts are summoned.
Forlorn by capitalism these rust belt settings and we who inhabit them have gained nothing and are left with even less. In the uncertainty of this destitution and the hell of this contemporary existence, I listen to ghosts or specters as my work undertakes a reimagining and rethinking of these landscapes as shifting, generative sights of potential. To find new ways, new futures…..A mass of security lights at the top of a steel post with concrete footer becomes the stage light for new rituals/dramas. Filming the exploration of an abandoned pool's new ecosystem, built during 1936 Berlin Olympics, becomes alive in its distraught histories and new derelict interventions. Images from trail cam footage of a coyote wandering the strip of woods next to a vacant strip mall confronts us with metaphors of re-inhabiting and reinvention.