Like many artists, Jason Clay Lewis seems to have a fascination with death. The majority of his unique sculptures and original art are either made from rat poison, include skulls or reappropriate religious icons like Buddha and the Virgin Mary in fur and foam. His collections have names like The Black Death, The God Of War and Devour... you get the picture. Despite the glut of macabre art on the market, I do find his pieces alluring and bet you will too.
He recently had an exhibition at the 31Grand in New York (the gallery is now closed) called Drop Dead Gorgeous that featured the highly bloggable D-Con Mary and Poison Christ shown below.
D-Con Mary:
Poison Christ:
But I also wanted to share with you his engraved bullets.
His engraved bullets were created back in 2002, but if you haven't seen them, they are very interesting pieces. By simply engraving words and or images on real rifle and colt 45 bullets, they take on a personal narrative and become either mementos or, in some cases, wishful harbingers of death. Take a look.
Celebrities: Justin Timberlake and Pamela Anderson
Power Players: George W Bush and Donald Rumsfeld
Tragedies And Assassinations: April 14th, 1912 and December 7th, 1941
Pin Up Girls:
The Seven Deadly Sins: Gluttony and Anger (technically, Wrath)
Zapruder Memento: The asassination of John F. Kennedy
And in 2004, as part of his Devour collection, he created 12 Shunga bullets (erotic japanese art)
A quote from the artist:
“As an artist, my approach has always been, intentionally, to confound and challenge attempts to make things fit into what we already know and think. I strive to question perceived beauty, passion, life, death, and creation. I have an urgent conviction that art is a passionate and essential affair, a matter of life and death, where one senses the only response to death is art. Without glossing over the violence of the natural world I ask questions about man’s suicidal folly, the one we call progress, a merger into a religion of commerce and profit, of false facades, and using a strategy to make us reconsider our world of visual imagery. I tinker with these visual explanations, trying to give them purpose, direction, and meaning. Always perfectly aware that knowing this constant probing does not have a sequence to a perfect solution. Atypical and fascinating, as an adventurer blending expression, analysis, and experience, I use every means and media available to explore the love of knowledge and depict limits, while trying to push those limits even farther. My interest in unique materials helps to develop my ideas of attraction verses repulsion allowing my work to have both a strong visceral feeling while maintaining a direct cerebral presence.”
Jason currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
See all his interesting work here.