Jim Wright draws on his deep appreciation of American music and the American rural tradition to create psychologically poignant and playfully beautiful paintings. Utilizing an unusual process in which brushstrokes are prefabricated and collaged onto panel, the paintings exhibit a candy-like tactility that implies rock-n-roll induced euphoria. Representing forgotten musical debris, animals, and lonely, wandering musicians, his paintings take on an archetypal yet psychedelic tone.

The artist's purposefully absurd and eccentric process effectively contrasts with the sincerity of his subject matter. Shrugging off the weight of painting's history, Wright has invented a language that exposes his sense of humor regarding traditional modes of image making. Taking his process cues from bluegrass and rock-n-roll (musical traditions rooted in flexibility and improvisation) he has developed an atypical painting system that builds a composition note by note. He cuts out templates of individual shapes, paints them in with acrylic, and then transfers the dried forms to panel. Thousands of separate slivers and shards, imitations of brushstrokes, are layered edge over edge, to sculptural effect.