Jiri Jacknowitz

Jiri Jacknowitz builds small worlds that reward prolonged attention. Raised in Marin County by a painter father and a singer mother, he first pursued music before developing a long career in visual effects. More than two decades at Industrial Light & Magic included digital paint and rotoscope work on films such as Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and the Pirates of the Caribbean series. His personal watercolors turn toward surreal, densely worked environments in which organic shapes, fluid surfaces and unexpected color suggest forms of life that remain difficult to classify. Now based in Amherst, Massachusetts, Jacknowitz brings that imaginative range to works whose modest physical scale belies their complexity. A small sheet of paper becomes an opening into a much larger, unfamiliar place.