By: Elizabeth Rushing
From May 20-27, Atlanta’s Art House gallery will feature the thesis exhibition of graduate painting student Jason S. Kofke. “Everything Will Be OK: A Show of Good Intentions. An Exhibition of Failures. 1979,” includes installations and evidence of public installations, books, video projections, slide stills and 16 mm films. Also included are about 20 etchings, lithographs, photogravures, Polaroid transfers, silverpoint drawings and oil paintings. The Brock Scott Quartet of Atlanta and Your Mascot from Gainesville, Fla., will perform toward the event’s end.
The lettering on Kofke’s exhibition cards is familiar — the phrase “Everything Will Be OK” is stickered, painted or written on street signs, phone booths, gas pumps, concrete blocks, walls and other objects “seen and documented in Savannah, Atlanta, Florida, Nevada, New York, California, France, London, Hungary and Italy,” said Kofke. “It seems to be a global sub-sub-cultural phenomenon. What part I played in this, if any, is hard to gauge.”
The works collected for Kofke’s thesis exhibition, however, include old war images of guns, aircraft, soldiers and pilots rendered in pale, warm neutral colors.
Kofke said his work addresses “the eminent potential of future failures through an interrogation of past disasters, success and close calls.”
“Everything Will Be OK came from a couple of different events of my past,” said Kofke, and explained that both things and people of the past inspire him. “Potential for success and potential for failure; risk and trust; love and loss; and hope and fear are the elements of life that inspire my thoughts and, thus, my work. I have chosen a few key events in global and personal history to act as symbols of these ideas, and those symbols become the content of my work. I like to think we can decide what will happen in the future by study of our past and [by] engaging in the present—thus, everything will be OK.”
Kofke first moved to Savannah in 2001, at the age of 22, and enrolled at SCAD as a sequential art student. “It was both a natural step from the work and ways of thinking I was using before I moved from home,” Kofke said. “[With comic books, as a kid,] I taught myself to draw. I loved sequential but switched to painting my senior year, [before moving] to Atlanta the first quarter it opened, spring 2005, and then went up to New York with the painting department’s New York Studio program in the summer of 2005, and thus completed my BFA in painting through SCAD. I rolled right into graduate school at SCAD and went through a whole collection of little hardships that helped inspire the work and impetus for this thesis.”
These “little hardships” include “failing a lot of grad level reviews, getting into trouble with my work, always running out of money, [joining] a band of musician-gypsies and hitch-hiking across the country until my father died of a heart attack.” After closing his family’s appliance business and tending to his father’s estate and his mother, Kofke transferred to SCAD Atlanta “where I figured out a lot of things about art and myself as an artist … I feel [this] is an exhibition of all my experiences and reactions to events from the past three years. Thus the double title: ‘An Exhibition of Failures. A Show of Good Intentions’ — for there are, and I am,” Kofke said, “both …”
Kofke is one of the first graduate students in the fine arts department to hold a thesis exhibition in Atlanta. The reception for Kofke’s thesis is Saturday, May 24 at 8 p.m., at the Art House gallery, 227 Mitchell St., Atlanta.
