CONTEMPORARY ART STOCKROOM Jacob Leary

Jacob Leary is a multi-disciplinary artist with a practice spanning a range of mediums including painting, prints, video and installation. His tendency toward the dynamic has fed his preoccupation with assemblage. Creating artworks that operate within a series, Leary allows for a tendency toward change to occur. It is this investigation not only of aesthetically pleasing pattern and systems, but also the theories of philosophers such as Manual DeLanda, which informs how his artworks are executed.

Liquid Portals 12.35 minute 2 channel video by Jacob Leary and Ariel Ruby, ed of 3 $4,400 AUD. (detail of work shown) Enquire about purchasing this video work by contacting FLG.

Leary’s works are composed through an intense and laborious process that combines digital drawing with more conventional modes of hand-crafted assemblage and collage. The sculptures he creates are reminiscent of topographic land masses – mountains of geometric forms undulating in a mass of exploding colour. The works start as two dimensional shapes or “territories” as he calls them but grow into worlds based on patterns and algorithmic systems that inform the artistic process of composition.
Excerpt from Something Terrain catalogue essay by Owen Craven, Melbourne-based Senior Curator with UAP

Jacob Leary completed his Masters of Fine Arts at the Hobart School of Art in 2011, undertaking research via a series of eclectic installations exploring the exponential growth of technology within contemporary culture. He has since been invited to participate in a range of high profile exhibitions and initiatives including the 2017 QANTAS Curates Initiative, which saw his works featured on the airline’s international Business Class amenity kits, exhibiting with the Tasmanian College of the Arts as part of DarkMofo in 2016 and with the Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery in 2013, as part of their Emerging Artists Program.

He has won numerous awards for his work, including the John Fries Memorial Prize (2012), a national award for emerging visual artists, and has also been the recipient of multiple grants including a Contemporary Art Tasmania Studio Grant in 2012 and an Australia Council Grant for Emerging Artists in 2013. He was a finalist in the Glover Prize (2018), the Hutchins Art Prize – Works on Paper (2018), the Redlands Art Prize (2016), the Burnie Print Prize (2015) and the City of Hobart Prize - Printmaking (2014). He has undertaken commissions for Hobart College and MONA FOMA and the Moonah Arts Centre.

Jacob is currently a seasonal staff member at the Hobart School of Art. His work is held in the collections of Artbank, University of Tasmania, Justin Art House Museum, RACT Collection, Tasmanian Government, llisington Collection and Ormond College.