"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

Jamie Nares established herself as a fixture among a milieu of avant-garde filmmakers, musicians, and visual artists in downtown New York in the late 1970s, when she co-founded the pioneering New Cinema on Saint Mark’s in 1977 and directed the no wave classic feature film Rome ’78 in 1978. In an effort to expand her artistic achievements, Nares made a conscious decision to redirect her attention to painting in 1982. On an impromptu visit to Egypt with the late critic Edit DeAk in 1983, Nares would make her last film before a public hiatus from the medium. She would not shoot another video until 1987 nor another film until 1998. What followed was a sustained, introspective effort to mark con-trolled passages of time in a variety of media, often on paper.

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."