Jake Kean Mayman. Ergonoptics.

About

Jake Kean Mayman’s paintings explore the systems, devices, and tools that mediate our experience of the world around us. With rigorous painterly precision, the artist stages objects ranging from surgical models, crumpled sheets of graph paper, ergonomic keyboards, and prosthetic hands in fields of uniform, opaque color. Isolated against their backdrops, these objects summon a range of themes including the lure of the technological sublime and the optimization of the human body.

Ergonomics - the applied science of workplace design - has long been an object of the artist’s fascination. In this exhibition, ergonomics serves as a metaphor for the economic imperative of ever-increasing productivity and the corollary impacts on the human body. While ergonomics is typically conceived as the machinic adaptation to the human body, Mayman is equally fascinated by the reverse process whereby the body is extended by technological prostheses. By demonstrating the distinctly human coevolution of technology and the body, Mayman echoes modern historians of science such as Michel Foucault who argues “that knowledge has anatomo-physiological conditions, that it is formed gradually within the structures of the body… that there is a nature of human knowledge that determines its forms and that at the same time can be manifest to it in its own empirical contents.” 

Mayman stages the production of embodied knowledge by juxtaposing the opticality of the painted image with our tactile experience of objects, questioning our ways of making and knowing across a range of senses. A one-handed ergonomic keyboard paired with a Dodie Thayer lettuce cup suggests pleasure and pain in the touch of an unseen hand; suture pads that mimic skin lacerations set against a flesh-tone backdrop serve as eerie surrogates for the violated body; sheets of graph paper designed to rationalize space are crumpled into useless dimensional forms; and prosthetic fingers highlight the uncanny aestheticization of posthuman appendages by the entertainment industry. Across these subjects, Mayman conjures both the beauty and the menace of our continuously evolving prosthetic realities.

Jake Kean Mayman (born Los Angeles, 1980) received a BFA in painting from New York University. Solo exhibitions include Technium Tidbits, Candice Madey, New York (2021), Existing Structures, Stellar Projects, New York (2018), and The Earth Dies Screaming, Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2017). Mayman has been included in numerous group exhibitions, and his work has been covered in The Los Angeles Times, Artforum, Vulture, and elsewhere. Mayman lives and works in Los Angeles.