For his first solo show at MW projects Jason Brooks will raise questions about the faith we have in mediated depictions of reality. He will be presenting a series of painstakingly rendered cabinet paintings, and, for the first time, explores sculpture by introducing a platform.

His practice involves taking photographs with a large format plate camera, from which he then paints the image using an airbrush, modifying the surface with a variety of techniques. He is interested in photography as a tool of exposure, using it to dissect the figures as much as possible. His paintings are about observing and surveying how people respond in front of the camera rather than trying to duplicate the way people behave. His severe attention to detail exposes the imperfection in the beauty of his subjects. His guiding principle is the quality of the photographic, through which he also takes a dispassionate stance in order to present models of photographs rather than models of people.  

Brooks’ subjects and themes have been evolving. His images have become more unsettling. From his early portraits he has moved onto pictures of tattooed models and of women urinating in the great out-doors, an irreverent act that aims at subverting the traditional conventions of landscape painting. There is a primeval mannerism in these female protagonists, exposed to the elements on a blustery beach or squatting beside the coarse bark of an oak tree. The edgy quality of these pictures arises from the friction between the excessive abjecthood found in the subject and their flush surface.

The sculptural element in this exhibition is reminiscent of a mechanic’s hoist. For his small, more    intimate paintings, Brooks has designed this apparatus to suggest, and again survey, the cathartic act of pissing, close up and in explicit detail. The work can be read in a pornographic sense. References to Michael Powell’s cult film Peeping Tom (1962) can be made, in particular its voyeuristic pleasure in seeing what is prohibited in relation to the female body. By beheading these women, Brooks removes the pornographic gaze, as he doesn’t authorise any eye contact between his pleasurable subjects and viewers. Feminine beauty becomes a function of certain practices of imaging - framing, lighting, camera movement and angle, however these associations are complicated by the artist’s irrevocable desire to simultaneously hark back to the traditional genres of painting, referring to the likes of Gustave Courbet, and Jean Louis Ernest Meissonier.

Jason Brooks (b.1968, Rotherham, UK) has been showing internationally and in the UK since 1992. In 2004 he participated at the John Moore’s painting prize in Liverpool, which he won in 1997, and I am a camera at the Saatchi Gallery, London, 2001. He was awarded the Natwest Art Prize in 1999.