The following is an essay by Rodman Hall Art Centre curator Marcie Bronson
For Marinko Jareb, art has always taken a cue from music. Establishing himself as a DJ during the 1990s, his foray into visual art was a natural and necessary progression from producing underground music events incorporating sound, light, and video. His earliest artworks were graphic posters publicizing these events, strategically employing screenprinted and collaged text and images to convey a sense of the sound and atmosphere. During the last two decades, Jareb has pursued visual art in its own right, yet his background in music and his ongoing work as a DJ continue to inform this practice. Moving fluidly moving between collage, sculpture, installation, audio, and occasionally drawing and painting, Jareb reworks, remixes, and reinterprets found sources to create new compositions that engage with diverse visual and aural histories.
While the Internet has facilitated access to a wealth of vintage and contemporary music recordings, historically, DJ culture involved hunting and gathering obscure or rare sources. Jareb has always cast a wider net, describing his sources, in music and in art, as “anything”. Continuously amassing collections and excising elements of those resources, he values discriminate and responsive editing above precious materials. Primarily working with free or “dirt cheap” materials (a principle that also guides his extensive record collection), Jareb makes use of what is at hand: ballpoint pen and highlighter on graph paper, crisp magazine fragments collaged onto rough plywood boards, house paint on canvas drop cloths stretched over old window frames. Work surfaces and remnants, like cutting mats or marker testing grounds, become the basis for new works; their imperfections are compositional starting points. Eschewing the blank slate of pristine, new materials, Jareb is liberated from concerns of cost or waste, and works freely, taking inspiration from the serendipity of his surroundings. The result is an extensive body of work that is at once strikingly diverse and interconnected in a host of subtle ways.
Much of Jareb's approach, including his quickly-executed, bold, graphic, style, can be traced to his early exploration of art and visual culture, and the work of artists such as Andy Warhol, whose distinctive, easily replicated style inspired more than Jareb's aesthetic. “Machine”, Jareb's graffiti tag—an apt alter-ego for a prolific creator who ceaselessly culls the world around him for source material—is a reference to Warhol’s New York City studio, known as “The Factory,” where Warhol's assistants produced screenprints and lithographs under the artist's direction. This impersonal, mass-produced character fit the culture of Jareb's mid-1990s techno music events, and the vivid palette and crisp, cutesy aesthetic he frequently employs is a nod to this era.
In Jareb's collages, layers of reductive and highly energetic forms create an experience of excess and joyous sensory overload, akin to the immersive environment of techno parties. Elements of varying scale advance or recede, while patterning and repetition of shapes through collage or stencilling create a visual rhythm, compositions that are informed, in part, by the repetition of looped techno music sound bites that become unintelligible and permute into new interpretations when extracted from their origins. Recurring iconography—dollar signs, skulls, pills—and words—fame, love, disco, party—reference the culture of consumption that prevailed during the period.
A series of dichotomies run throughout Jareb's work—raw/refined, analog/digital, natural/synthetic—and perhaps most intriguing is how he merges his interest in technology with a deep reverence and regard for the natural world. While Jareb’s concern for the environment influences the reclamation of materials that is at the core of his longtime “no waste method”, in recent years he has awakened to the use of natural materials foraged from gorges, lakes, and other natural spaces he frequents. Weathered pieces of driftwood pulled from the beach near his home in north St. Catharines become unconventional skateboard decks, or the top of a tiny table his young daughter uses when it isn’t exhibited in the gallery.
Jareb’s process here is notable; in these instances, he noticed elements in the landscape that are often overlooked by our hypersaturated, information-overloaded culture (which he so often mines for subject matter), and allowed their natural forms to dictate the final works. Like flipping through milk crates full of records at a flea market, Jareb describes his approach as “digging through different layers of debris so that you can unearth things that other people don't realize as golden”. It has often been repeated that luck is the intersection of preparation and opportunity, and this is true for Jareb's jackpots. He has honed his craft over the last two decades, he is carefully attuned to the world around him, and he is responsive to chance events. Upon finding a vertically-oriented piece of wood poised like a deck leaning against a wall, his revelation was “gotta make a skateboard” and through the minimal gesture of attaching wide trucks and big, soft wheels, Jareb–who still skates a few times a week—fashioned functional skateboards. Though not suited to tricks, the wide turning radius of these boards makes simple cruising a trick in itself.
These works harken back to the origins of skateboarding, when kids cobbled together 2 x 4’s or apple crates with clay wheels or the bottoms of roller skates. There is a synchronicity in that history and Jareb’s practice, both employing limited means, both coming from a desire to create something out of nothing, both constantly pushing the limits and expectations of materials and surroundings. And both are marked by an ever-searching, boundless creativity. The expertise and combination of planning and spontaneity that make the choreography of a string of tricks in a line is much like the relationship between a progression of songs in a set, or a series of marks in a work of art.
Jareb recognizes an inherent beauty in the imperfections of the items he scrounges, whether from culture or nature, likening them to the hiss and pop of scratched vinyl records, and he has noted that while Djing often involves the pursuit of control, for him, it is most interesting when it spins out of control. In that space of play and experimentation is room for the unexpected, for discovery, for the serendipity of unimagined synergies. It is an approach that can't be fully calculated, and opposes the slick production of much contemporary art and music. As the artist asserts: “If you're interested in perfection, use a computer.” Jareb is the machine, but his distinctly human ability to rework, remix, and reinterpret, creates experiences that transform.
-Marcie Bronson (curator, Rodman Hall Art Centre / Brock University)
