Jamie Nares b. 1953
"There's always a connection between the films and everything else, maybe particularly in the early ones where I was so focused on these kinds of primal forces at all times. I wasn't making paintings in those days, although the paintings do imply a lot of the same concerns as those early films—gravity and speed and movement and time and light." —Jamie Nares
Over the course of a five-decade career, Jamie Nares has investigated, challenged, and expanded the boundaries of her multi-media practice that encompasses film, music, painting, photography, and performance. She continues to employ various media to explore physicality, motion, and the unfolding of time.
In the 1980s, Nares began to paint using brushes of her own manufacture to create monumental strokes that appear almost three dimensional in their detail and depth, recording a gestural passage of time and motion across the canvas. In 2013, Kasmin's exhibition Road Paint presented the first iteration of paintings executed with the same thermoplastic paint used on tarmacs and roads. In 2014, the gallery presented her HIGH SPEED DRAWINGS - created, like much of the artist's work - using equipment co-opted and repurposed from industrial or scientific applications. The late Glenn O'Brien aptly described Nares as the "scientific painter," for whom each work is "a research project...a game, but [a game in which] the rules are the rules of physics."
Since 2009, her film and video based work has been executed with cameras capable of shooting at extremely high frame-rates per second, which, when played back, slow down ordinary movements to a speed that allows the viewer to perceive infinitesimally small details. STREET, inspired by the "actualities" films of Edison, the Lumieres, and other early filmmakers, applies this extreme slow-motion technology to shots taken from a moving car of the neighborhoods and denizens of Manhattan. The more recent Portraits, on the other hand, consist entirely of long takes, in medium-close-up, of friends, family, and collaborators. Gestures and facial expressions that would ordinarily register subliminally become intensely dramatic moments.
Jamie Nares (born James Nares) became public with her gender identity in 2019 and changed her artist name in 2024. Her preference is to use Jamie Nares in newly published communications relating to her practice.
Museum Exhibitions & Collections
Nares has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and a career-spanning retrospective at the Milwaukee Art Museum in 2019. In 2024, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized a five-decade film and video retrospective of Nares' work. A career-spanning survey of her film and video works was presented in 2008 at the Anthology Film Archives, New York, and in 2011 at the IFC Center, New York. Her work is included in several prominent public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 2014, Rizzoli published the most comprehensive monograph on Nares' career to date. Nares has lived and worked in New York since 1974.