Exhibition Information

Jeremy Tarr: Forsaken Ecologies
August 26 - October 11, 2019

Tarr’s work deals with abandoned and vacant spaces in a state of decay indicative of the post-industrial world and the new myths and narratives that arise in their place. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that played a significant role in his development as an artist. The ever-present distinctive industrial aesthetic of the urban landscape shaped Tarr’s perception of nature. The contrast of human intervention in the wilderness informs his choice of materials and subject matters for his sculptural objects and installations. Tarr explains. “Places of abandonment-alleyways, vacant houses, derelict properties are my sights of reckoning and liberation. The strip of a wooded dumping ground and other forgotten sites are the platforms for rethinking and reimagining the world. Free from purpose, laws, rules, and constraint they are the sight where new mythologies and cosmologies are conjured, and ghosts are summoned.”

The transference of the industrial construction elements and physicality indoor creates a sense of displacement and intrusion. Tarr elaborates. “Specters loom throughout the decaying private properties of our landscape. Motion detector lights, security cameras, and chain link fencing separate the public from the history of its false promises. In these hinterlands, the back of beyond, images and affects-traces resounding in forsaken ecologies become tangible in absence. The emptiness of the American rust belt is so vast that an unseen horrid spectacle forms from its void. The ecological ghost of the American dream lingers in the vacant parking lots, abandoned factories, bodies, and beings possessed in their fragmented mythologies and folktales. This wildness knows what it is, but not its own depth. We know it as unknown, as foreign and forever alien.” 

About Jeremy

He works in performance, video, sculpture, photography. His undergraduate education is in printmaking and sculpture. Tarr received his MFA in Studio Art at Syracuse University in the spring of 2019. In 2017 he received an Artist-in-Residency Fellowship in Berlin, Germany and had a studio at the Axel Haubrok Fahrbereitschaft Collection. In the fall of 2019, Tarr joined the Art and Art History Department at SUNY Cortland as the Assistant to Gallery Director at Dowd Gallery.