TO SEE THE SOUND AND HEAR THE SIGHT | JERED SPRECHER

The board at 580 Case is a community art project that debuts work made for the site on a 2-month rotation printed at 8x8’ on vinyl.

TO SEE THE SOUND AND HEAR THE SIGHT is a woven image by Tennessee-based painter Jered Sprecher from a series that began in 2020 with Sprecher disassembling books and cutting the pages into thin strips in order to weave two discrete images together. ''The resulting image and woven object are always surprising. There are revelatory bits of color and shape that peek through and unexpected neighbors that sit next to each other as this new image is formed.'

"I hunt and gather images of flowers, thick forests, sun-dappled foliage, and birds; seeking images that evoke wonder and depict natural beauty, complexity, and immensity. These images are the origin of my work, acting as an evolving matrix. Digital lenses, scanners, glowing screens, glossy plastics, degraded photographs, and gridded weaving patterns provide a reservoir of visual artifacts that I use to transform images of nature. The underlying irregular grid creates a push and pull, as flowers and leaves emerge yet are pulled back into the flickering tangle, creating a discordant reality, a place of wonder."

Jered Sprecher is an artist who makes paintings, drawings, and installations that abstract the landscape to explore the precarious relationship between nature and technology. His work wrestles with the beauty and complexity of the environment and how we as humans interact with the world around us both directly and mediated through technology. He received his BA from Concordia University and his MFA from The University of Iowa. Sprecher has exhibited at The Drawing Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Des Moines Art Center, Hunter Museum, Asheville Art Museum, and Espai d'art Contemporani de Castelló. He has had solo exhibitions at Jeff Bailey Gallery, New York; Gallery 16, San Francisco; Stephen Zevitas Gallery, Boston; Kinkead Contemporary, Los Angeles; Whitespace, Atlanta; and the Knoxville Museum of Art. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Bailey Opportunity Grant, and a Tennessee Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship. Sprecher has been awarded residencies at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, the Chinati Foundation, The American Academy in Rome, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art. He is a Professor at the School of Art at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville where he lives and works.

Image: (detail) inkjet print on vinyl, 8x8’ original work, woven book pages, 24x24”, 2024