Jason Young is a queer, Vancouver-based, primarily self-taught, outsider artist.
Abstraction, spontaneity, and play are integral to his art practice, which focuses on creating automatic, abstract portraits (from life) of the people he meets. Using the energy of the moment and the intimacy between the subject and viewer, Jason seeks to find new ways of conveying identities, emotions, and narratives in his paintings. These images investigate the space between queerness and abstraction through deconstructed portraiture, highlighting actual members of the queer community. The portraits attempt to interpret the subject’s identity by transcribing the physical and psychic space between the subject and the viewer through mark-making and color.
Jason’s work is concerned with the (queer) gaze, the politics of seeing and being seen. His portraits act as a record; they say definitively, “I am here, I see you…” for the model and artist. With his recent work, the artist invites the viewer to consider how people relate to one another in society and how we situate each other through the act of looking.
