We visited Jack at his home studio in East Boston in preparation for the showing at Dark, Sharp, & Burning on the 17th.  Having never met Jack before, it was overwhelmingly gracious for him to allow us into his world. I wanted this initial show ‘Dark, Sharp, & Burning’ to present artists that’re working in the shadows, completely absorbed in their own passion, even when it hurts. I know one of the reasons we’ve never met is because his studio is where he is most of the time. Isolation comes with the territory.

We connected immediately. Jack’s dedication, diligence, and passion for the progression of his work was immediately felt. His thoughtful and eloquent communication was inspiring. It reinforced my commitment towards building a larger platform for artists like us to share our unique vision. It was beyond invigorating being a welcomed guest in Jack’s studio.

Jack Byers’ tactical abstraction is true to the balanced contrast of his lifestyle as a NYC graffiti writer and Upstate skier. His line work cuts through the paper like snow, thin sharp edges slice slick graphic lines, agile in altering directions, tapering, spraying powdered shade gradients across page after page. Undeniably connected to the streets, his work pumps in the cities dynamism, electrical wire lines carrying across the culture, a jazz party onto the ski lift that continues to carry us to new heights.

From the view above his stacks of drawings lay quiet and still— the pile up after the storm. Expansive unknown layered explorations writhe underneath, each page its own complex worldly system. To unearth and flip through begins to show a storm that has never stopped raging, his drawn representations boldly intertwine environmental texture with typographic mantras. His compositions courageously craft an art object drawing in distant disparate sights and sounds. His drawings frame the city from the perspective of an escape, as if he’s drawing through the fog. His presentation of negative space allows the viewer to embrace this liminality, his repeated masking technique laying bare the fragile construction of the built environment. The thirst to get outside. His drawings invite viewer to cut their own curious way out through the unknown, using Jack’s line as a guiding principle.

His principle is rendered as complete freedom in the mastery. Jack’s dexterous employment of the tool and technique to create his line is resonant of Musashi— the Samurai swordsman. Within his dedicated medium of pen & ink, Jack is constantly reinventing, pushing the boundaries of what’s typical for the tool. He showed me a hand built airbrush attachment that hooked up to a marker to achieve a classic Deco-style shading effect. His balance of dedication with constant reimagining of what a line could be is what continues to guide us forward.  

Jack Byers deeply understands the rules that he’s breaking. He’s got the grid mapped out. It’s a base underneath five sheets of tracing paper. Jack’s practice echoes the tradition that came before his torrent of work, yet that we have to keep drawing new lines forward, even if they zig and zag. Lines that show us that the right way is most definitely not the easy way. That the path ahead is always somewhere in a snow storm. That there are always bumps along the way and recognizing those as part of the beauty is a necessary part of living. Jacks work illuminates this connection, helping us see the beauty in all potentiality, cutting through the smoky jazz club and the fog amongst the pines.

Do you remember your earliest interaction with 'art'? what made you want to be an artist? 

My earliest interaction was being taken to different museums by my parents. The first one that really had a memorable effect on me was the Guggenheim in NYC. Being in that building established a reverence for minimalism and uniquely considered space. I can't remember if it was there or elsewhere, but the midcentury modernists like Moholy-Nagy and abstract expressionists like Rothko always caught my eye because of how their work largely lacks any sort of figurative reference, but creates such intimate feelings. 

I first consciously wanted to be an artist around 2013. Around that time I started trying to unite my influences to create the artwork that I wanted to see, but did not exist in the world.

what're you reading currently?

Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin

Your letterforms have undergone a series of evolutions. You're really good at documenting it. Do you reflect on your growth often? What do you deem 'progress'? What keeps you pushing forward?

I feel like my documentation isn't quite what social media demands, but I do pride myself on not putting any lipstick on the pig so to speak.. What you see is less than what you get. Progression for me is striving to always outdo yourself, which is kind of a delicate ecosystem. If you don't take enough risks, it's easy to be better than yourself in the past, but if you bite off more than you can chew too frequently then you'll feel listless and stuck. I struggle with that balance every day. For the past couple years I really didn't look at my back catalog too much, for fear that it would make me self-referential and stale. More recently I've realized that I need to be constantly using that past work as the foundation for future stuff. Now, probably my biggest motivator is trying to find out how to expand upon that initial creative spark I had a few years ago, instead of constantly trying to reinvent it.

How do you feel about the art scene in Boston? 

[laughs] I knew you were going to ask this. It's difficult to make a blanket statement about the scene because it kind of means something different to anyone involved in their own way. From my perspective, it's like this... Boston as a city has made, and continues to make poor decisions involving art that perpetuate the general public's conception of art as a leisure activity or a cultural commodity. One example that always sticks with me is the destruction of Scollay Square and the West End in the '40s and '50s juxtaposed with the creation of the SoWA district in the early 2000's. Scollay Square and the West End were working class neighborhoods that were on similar tracks to Greenwich Village in NYC at their time. With their destruction, they never existed to provide artists and counterculture with refuge the way the destitute neighborhoods of NYC in the '60's did, and thus the city never really developed a relevant home for artists. Fast forward to the turn of the millennia when a property developer decides to designate an area of the city to be an arts district. Two decades later, that neighborhood is only within reach to those who are independently wealthy, reinforcing the notion of art as a leisure activity. 

 All that doom and gloom aside, I'm lucky enough to be a member of a community of deeply talented artists and creators in Boston, energized by people like yourself. It feels like such a healthy ecosystem because it's not funded by corporations looking for an in with the youth, but rather the determination of it's members to create something where there is nothing. Although there's still a ton of work to be done, it's a vibrant time to be an artist in Boston. If you look at subway graffiti in NYC in the '70s, arguably the most influential art movement in the past 50 years, you see a movement that started because creative people were being ignored and marginalized. There's a lot of those people here.

Do you have inspirations outside of art that inform your practice?

Outside of visual art: Jazz, Hip Hop, some Electronic Music, and literature. Outside of art in general: traveling and whiskey

Are you looking to challenge the viewer to discover your meaning? to make the connections? Or are they just for you? 

I think my work is pretty challenging in general. I don't think I set out to do that, but it's also not my goal to tell the viewer what to think. It's kind of the opposite of most lettering art which can sometimes feel a little bit like an ice cream cone..satisfying a desire but not sticking around for very long. I try to stick to a balance between sense and nonsense by putting in enough information for the viewer to get pulled in, but not so much that they quickly resolve it and move on. There's deeply personal meaning in almost all of my work but it's heavily camouflaged. I do that because it's cathartic and helps me resolve things that happen in my life, not to share secrets. 

How is technology shaping art these days? 

My friend Matt Zaremba and I were just talking about this the other night. He put me onto this Ted Talk by Jia Jia Fei called Art in the Age of Instagram, in which she talks about how social media is changing the value and purpose of a work of art. An artist makes a thing, and that thing lives in a museum or gallery, but it also now lives on the internet through all of the selfies and photos taken of it. On one hand that leads to artists now having to consider how well the piece will lend itself to a digital life, but on the other hand could it also open the door for artists to create impactful work that has to be experienced in person? And is this an antidote to the in-person impact of art being diminished by it's appearance on the internet? Last summer I was lucky enough to see "Continuum" by Ryoji Ikeda at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and it struck me as interesting in that it's technically a "digital" piece of art, but could not be experienced fully unless you were there in person.

See Jack Byers work in the flesh at Dark, Sharp, and Burning on the 17th. Or digitally on his website and on his instagram