Figuration Commentary

The Drawers - Jack Butler Commentary by Julie Oakes

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The Dark Side - 2009, Headbones Gallery

Large cut paper silhouettes by Jack Butler loom large. Grace Jones leans forward with her eyes looking back, the white cut-outs perfectly defining her glance. The surface is a patch work of rusty images on black Japanese paper. The image, super-sized but with the intrinsic fragility of paper is surprisingly durable, pinned to the wall with silver pins like the no-longer-fluttering wings of a dead butterfly. That Grace Jones, whose blue-black, unisex image became as famous as her vocals, should reign in splendour on the walls of Headbones Gallery during the inauguration of the first black American president, is a poignant example of art's piercing prescience.

Paris Haircut, struts dark humour with eyes and mouth cut from the hair on the back of a male head like a second bristly visage dramatically poised as resilient as hip-ness. The image was originally a by-product of the beauty business. Butler has creatively elevated the commercial advertisement with a new and impressive magnitude that manages to still retain a lacy and airy quality as the white wall is seen through the snippets.

Butler has a history of exploration in the nether realms. His imaging of the development of sex in the embryological and fetal stages broke ground for medicine and science as he made visual the growth of genitalia, hitherto unseen. The initial identification as to male or female was found to be not as black and white as it was believed to be. By shining the light of seeing upon the dark and undiscovered, he advanced man's knowledge of his humanity. He has also known the dark side in his forays into the land of the midnight sun. One of the pioneers for the advancement of the awareness of Inuit art, he has furthered the flowering of the art of indigenous peoples.