Through artworks in diverse media, Jason Bailer Losh addresses the present by negotiating with the past. In the assemblage sculptures for which he is best known, he recycles parts of wooden furniture and homewares, mass-produced domestic tchotchkes and other carvings to create hybrid totems that both honor and critique mid-century European and North American modernist sculpture.
Losh interleaves the art-historical, the sociological and the personal in his work. He internalizes formal lessons from sculptors such as Constantin Brancusi and Anthony Caro, including a sense of scale and proportion, an attunement to negative space and the ability to imbue abstraction with narrative. Akin to assemblage and appropriation artists such as Cady Noland or Noah Purifoy, Losh allows the components of his assemblages to speak of their past lives in American kitchens and living rooms, or on the console tables of office buildings or mid-range hotels. Their often-outlandish forms – fantails, tapered pegs, turned posts, bobbles, leaves and other flourishes – separate them from the putatively universal elementality of their modernist forbears.
In this way, Losh reveals the abstract sculpture he references as being far from universal, but instead as sharply gendered, racialized, geographically and demographically specific. Through his work he contends with his own history – that of a man raised in a struggling working-class white Midwestern family – as it relates to the elite sensibilities embodied in the kinds of plinth-mounted abstract sculpture he once encountered only in museums.
Losh’s work is a poignant analysis of the contemporary conditions of class in the United States, consumed with the promises of elite metropolitan culture as well as with its disappointments. He inherits respect for craft and soundness of fabrication from his parents, who are both involved in the carpentry and construction industry. And many of his materials were given to him by his sculptor father-in-law, who over his lifetime has amassed a sizeable collection of wooden artifacts and curios, many crafted or modified by himself.
The human figure is absent in Losh’s work, though always implied. Empty chairs are recurrent motifs. In the series ‘Three Holes in a Parachute’ (2019), wooden objects gifted by his father-in-law were incorporated into chair forms carved by Losh from large blocks of Styrofoam coated in fiberglass. By imbuing found objects with new meanings and statuses, Losh is looking towards the future while grappling with the realities of his present and the residues of the past.
In a parallel body of work, Losh paints domestic interiors that exist in an ambiguous space between idealized visions of vintage elegance and the kinds of contrived, aspirational templates for contemporary living one sees on Instagram or in Architectural Digest magazine. In a wry gesture, Losh inserts his own sculptures and other found objects into these genteel surroundings – interlopers made from low-grade bric-a-brac, now perfectly at home.
Losh was born in Denison, Iowa, and received his MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York. He lives and works in Connecticut. His work has been exhibited at such institutions as LAXART, Los Angeles; Socrates Sculpture Park, New York; FLAG Art Foundation, New York; and Fairview Museum of Art and History, Fairview, Utah. He has had solo exhibitions at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles; ZieherSmith, New York; and Control Room, Los Angeles. He has participated in group exhibitions including ‘Rockaway!’, organized by Klaus Biesenbach at PS1/Rockaway Surf Club, New York; ‘Soft Target’, curated by Phil Chang and Matthew Porter at M+B Gallery, Los Angeles; and ‘Building Materials’, curated by Lucas Blalock at Control Room, Los Angeles.