Jeremy DePrez: Tenant

About

“A couple years back I used to frequent this Starbucks near the job I was working at.

One day I happened to notice some business type wearing a button up dress shirt that had a two-colorvertical line pattern thatwrinkled, vibrated and undulated all at once, constantly changingas itmoved. I immediately started to think of my Dad (a traveling family portrait salesman) as someonewho would wear this kind of shirt and as time went on I started to notice the patternmore andmore.At some point out of formal necessity I actually bought a shirt with the same pattern asthe one that had become so visible.When I got it home I quickly realizedit not only didn’t reallyfit—the sleeves were too short,it wasboxy andover all ill fitting—but itwasn’t something I wasinterested in wearing,so I took it off and tossed it on the floor.While digging through laundry some time after, the shirt reappeared and I started thinking aboutits physical properties and the collected associations I had developed in relation to it.I ended up

taking a bunch of images of the shirt and using them as the framework for a few paintings.Ididn’t just want to put uniform lines next to each other and let them interact, but to try and paintthe effect that the shirt created when looked at.I wanted to see what attempting to do thiswould create and if I could somehow visually capture the varied levels of meaningful authority thisshirt had stressed to me. I made a few paintings but they all fell a little short of what I was lookingfor;so after some time away from working with it,I decided I would try again.I made the paintingmuch bigger and more complicated,both visually and structurally,than earlier iterations with thehope that itwould impose itself onto the viewer like the shirt had impressed itself onto me.Iended up titling the painting ‘Chuck,’after my Dad.”