Jason Stovall

Bodies accumulate more than they show. Growing up gay in Fort McMurray, Alberta — within industry, religious conservatism, and emotional restraint — taught me early what it means for a body to carry more than it can express. Seven years of professional tattooing extended this knowledge into daily practice: skin permanently altered through contact, identity negotiated through sustained proximity, the body literally changed through relation with another. My paintings emerge from these forms of knowledge, absorbing forces as pressure rather than narrative.

Humour operates in my work not as relief from difficult material but as a means of entering it — contorted bodies, erotic entanglements, figures so thoroughly absorbed in themselves they tip into the absurd. Colour, mark, and paint quantity are themselves disproportionate; juxtapositions and contradictions articulate more precisely what other registers cannot. It operates as a point of inflection on the gap between what a body is made to mean and what it actually is, between social inscription and the private interior life that persists beneath it.

My material process probes that same gap. I respond to material as much as I direct it, working with what the work asks of me. Surfaces are built through layering and reworking; decisions and mistakes left visible. Material functions as sensation and weight rather than description. While the impact is immediate in some works, others require sustained attention so the relational tension, movement, and resistance register in the surface.

Shaped by pressure, contact, and relation, figures are never fixed but continuously reorganized under forces they cannot contain. It is through that reorganization that something new becomes possible. Meaning emerges through proximity, posture, and spatial tension rather than narrative or resolved identity. Multiple states coexist — support and burden, intimacy and estrangement — without consolidating into fixed form. I want my work to leave people considering their own relationship to others, and to themselves — what they carry, and what they have been permitted to become.