ABOUT
Iris Jaffe (b. 1982, New York, NY ) is an artist, curator, writer, project manager, and part polymath part jack of all trades in the visual arts. Her acrylic and oil paintings on canvas are a vibrant tapestry of color and culture that draw inspiration from a range of intellectual disciplines and areas of life. By incorporating elements of collage, she creates dynamic compositions that blur the lines between dualities such as high and low brow culture, past and present.
Jaffe's use of bright, bold colors and unique juxtapositions imbue her paintings with a sense of energy and mystery. Each piece is a collage of visual experiences and cultural references, inviting the viewer to engage with multiple layers of meaning and interpretation.
Iris Jaffe earned a BA with Honors from Brown University and has worked for the contemporary sculptor Tom Sachs and the art gallerist Ronald Feldman. Her oeuvre consists of painting, digital imaging, digital photography, collage, sculpture, drawing, and installation. Her work has been exhibited across New York and in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Brittany, France. She has been published in Hyperallergic and Whitehot Magazine and was featured in the book Making History Bushwick. The artist currently lives and works in New York.
PERSONAL ARTIST'S STATEMENT
Growing up, I was always intrigued and excited by art; and as I grew older it became a way to escape the banalities and unpleasantries of everyday life. I still remember the posters of works by famous modern painters that graced the display cases in the hallway of my kindergarten school and my first encounter with the magic that is craft glitter! As a teenager, I received a lot of criticism about the way that I looked; and hence art re-emerged as a way that I could enjoy, engage with, and create beauty, without having to think about my own inability to be beautiful (a belief I have since identified as being false and limiting). Later on, in college, where I unexpectedly decided to double major in visual art and art history, art further developed into a channel for me to express myself, explore my relationship to the world, and process complex emotions and difficult life experiences.
I am of half Chinese and half Ashkenazi decent and grew up in the suburbs of New York during the 80’s and 90’s, when globalization was at full speed. I spent my childhood surrounded by the diverse plethora of images that the mass media (television, magazines, posters, consumer goods, etc.) then made possible and filled my everyday environments with. I took pleasure in cutting up the many magazines that I coopted from my parents and making large, complex collages for all of my friends with glitter lettering, which is still a slightly guilty pleasure of mine.
Between American school, Chinese school, and Hebrew School, I attended school every day of the week - enjoying the different types of art I was exposed to in each school. I also became accustomed to elements of different cultures being mixed together early on. For example, my lunchbox would be filled with home-cooked Chinese food, a boxed guava drink from the Asian market, and an American fruit roll up, while dinners at home similarly involved a mishmash of Chinese and American cooking.
At Brown University, I fell in love with Art History, which had not been offered at the otherwise excellent public high school that I attended. During this time, I began making larger paintings under the direction of my college mentor, Wendy Edwards, who encouraged me to work large and explore my identity as an artist. I was naturally drawn to making collage-inspired paintings and the process of collaging as a way of quickly outputting ideas. For my final thesis in the honors program at Brown, I combined different aesthetic styles and used imagery that I loved from Art History, my life, and popular culture to explore my questions about life, the world around me, the human condition, personal identity, and art itself - most of which I still do.
As a professional artist, my art brain is forever active and I continue to explore my questions about life and the human condition. Currently, my practice is grounded in oil and acrylic painting on canvas, but I enjoy working in nearly every fine art medium and at different scales and dimensions.
