wen UR luvd it iz t% much

I just saw a show of paintings and drawings by Jered Sprecher at Lipscomb University. Sprecher teaches painting at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. The tittle of the show, "wen U R luvd it iz t% much" and Sprecher's statement can give you an idea of what the paintings could look like. The tittle is made up using words and characters which are not grammatically correct by any means but can be nonetheless found being used in daily life. Replacing 'you are' with 'U R' speaks to the pace of our culture right now. The casualness of speaking through the computer and the ease at which mistakes can be overlooked in type make it so that we can accept the replacement of 'you are' without much difficulty. It is easier and faster to use such replacements and so it becomes something that is no big deal.

Similarly to his title, the paintings are also these things taken from daily life. Taken from the constant movement and put up against other things. Things that may or may not be instantly recognized but do evoke feelings of familiarity.

"I am a hunter and a gatherer, constantly accumulating images produced by the people and cultures around me. Segments of this collection of images then emerge in my paintings. My work shows images that are revealed as fragments in the midst of change, destruction, redefinition, and restoration. The sources they are drawn from are changing and evolving and the paintings are caught in that “still” moment of change. Today as the exchange of information increases on a daily basis, it becomes more difficult to trace the heredity of images. One is seldom afforded the time to begin to understand what one is viewing before the image has moved on and evolved. It is out of this fast paced exchange that I extract elements that resonate with a sense of vital meaning. I seek to use this wide language of visual marks and notations to describe that which humanity has in common, be it humor, mortality, or yearning to understand what is beyond.

My work is based in an eclectic aesthetic. My paintings extract elements from the high and low of visual culture. This culture and crush of images is in constant flux. My paintings hold no single allegiance, but are constantly shifting from one form of representation to another. The paintings function as sources of both inductive and deductive image making processes. In our day-to-day life, one is seldom afforded the time to comprehend what one is viewing under the barrage of images produced by humankind. I try to grasp a single moment, a glance, a small epiphany. The paintings are haptic documents of everything and nothing."