I was born in North Carolina and am living and working in Los Angeles. My work includes sculpture, installation, painting, drawing and printmaking. Generally working in various materials in purposefully mediated ways, the current body of work is drawing on the mediation between material and maker, process and intervention. 
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The sculpture is body-sized, or created as a result of my action and need to be physically involved in making the work.  Like most, I connect to the physical world through and with my body, so using my physicality to make the work is another layer of energy and tension.  Humble construction materials are used for their immediacy.  The wood elements are the bottom of the barrel cheapest wood found at Home Depot and other big box lumber yards.  Cast resin mimics the plastic sheet it was cast on, giving it mass and shifting the texture to something important, a physical form and direction against gravity, and a grounding familiarity in the mundane.  Passing through layers, portals…Black becomes no space, the space of transition. The spooky spirit shadow thing is creeping out from the crack between the clock and the wall.

Color used in combination with line mimics elements of light logic, transforming the media (colored pencil, marker, etc.) into something altogether different.  Forcing together highly constructed processes with gestural processes is a common theme. Radial composition as it relates to the self, the universe. Tension of learning, being in the space you don’t know about, transitions. Stepping beside yourself to see what’s on the other side, on one of the sides at least. How a conical tube of material can allude to travel through it, how the esoteric understanding of a crystal ball lends itself to and possibly visually explains an occurrence or idea in theoretical physics.  The mundane turned into the phenomenal, or at least paranormal. It’s beautiful in its unexpected places.

The drawings are almost a minimal exercise, the black paper and colored pencils combined yield a different surface and depth to the process. The pencil line becomes a physical thing, or the image equivalent to a thing. As the disruption, glitch, texture, change, etc. occurs, and the line reacts to it, it becomes a good visual stand in for a decent attempt at trying to draw that occurrence. The difference here is that it’s a mechanical occurrence and not one mitigated by the hand. Or is it? I try to repeat homogeneity as much as possible for purity of attempt, but I am human and cannot do the same thing twice as much as I try. Let alone a hundred times. The tension between randomness and controlled effort becomes a point of methodology. So, as much as we understand the world through systems (as opposed to randomness), and we attribute ourselves as part of these systems, we should not be able to create randomness when our muscle memory says otherwise.

It’s an invitation to enjoy contradictions, things that amplify each other.  And to enjoy catharsis—when one thing is wholly defined by its opposite. Putting them together and seeing what happens, with all of it being governed by time as the common element that points us to the systems of understanding, marking, and evaluating.  Texture within time is what we crave; it allows us to be seduced into an idea, to ease us into the hard parts.


Jamison has shown widely through out Southern California as well as New York, Miami and Italy.  He received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2001 and teaches Sculpture and 3D Design at Los Angeles Valley College.