Jake Scharbach: Hand To Hand

Washington state native Jake Scharbach’s vibrant allegories force ancient and modern into a confrontation that feels both comic and serious. He says he likes to “focus on the materialization of symbols and signs, through an exercise of comparison, to analyze contemporary cultural values.” The series Black Boxes depicts flight data recorders from crashed airliners combined with classical portrait busts. His American hyper-realism feels timeless, the surfaces as seductive as the falsehoods they seek to expose. He may purport to “question the medium itself,” but the viewer will, first and foremost, drool.