Jack Leamy’s recent project, Psycho Mythos, is built upon decades of figurative work now transformed by geometric abstraction as a scaffolding towards inner truths and outer realities. Relying on methods of automatic drawing and chance operation Leamy opens the mythic substrate further allowing subconscious archetypes to enter the frame as a civic flashpoint. In this way new fields of psychic and emotional energies can charge the picture plane. His sensibility remains as a social activist using art as an interrogative device. The subject remains the same by uprooting, through art practice, ideological oppressive systems, rapacious capitalism/coloniality, for example, and making connections to agency as a creative political aesthetic act. Deliberately, this body of work is in a lineage that runs the gambit through Gollub, Guston, Beckman and Goya.

Jack Leamy has received the Headlands Center for the Arts Tournesol Award, The San Francisco Art Institute’s (SFAI) Irene Pijoan Painting Award for Painting, SOMArt’s Commons curatorial Residency, and was nominated for the SFMOMA SECA Award. Recently, Leamy has received the AIG Grant from VAPA/OUSD extending a culturally responsive pedagogy by engaging youth with higher education opportunities combining Elder narratives and film animation.