York College of PA Galleries featuring exhibition of work by Jeremy Tarr focused on landscape left in wake of late capitalism

The York College of Pennsylvania Galleries in Wolf Hall are featuring a solo exhibition of new work by Jeremy Tarr focused on the landscape left in the wake of late capitalism. The exhibition, “ET IN ARCADIA EGO,” opened on Aug. 22 and runs through Oct. 5. A closing reception will begin at 6 p.m., with an artist lecture at 7 p.m. on Oct. 5 in DeMeester Recital Hall. All events are open to the public free of charge.

Tarr’s installation is composed of images and objects of a landscape left in the wake of late capitalism: post-industry, post-promise, post-America. Taking reference from the byproducts of the Hinterlands, the flora and fauna of the back of beyond, Tarr’s work transmogrifies these landscapes from barren post-industrial dumping grounds to spaces that pulse with life through their interpolation of the specters of the forgotten — their un-knowing as a life living on. 

Tarr’s description of the exhibition: “Honeysuckle climbs out of a metal cot frame and wraps around carbon fiber rods used by archers in contemporary arrow making. Hand-scanned images of VHS sourced from a Pentecostal church turned video rental store in Rust-Belt New York are printed onto aluminum that reflects images between landscape: body and abstraction. The scans hold a memory in a landscape of forgotten media and the silhouette of the viewer in their refraction of the light. 

“In the adjacent room, a honeysuckle grows through a steel frame holding a CT scan of a Pleistocene wolf’s head found in permafrost, Computer Numerical Control (CNC)’d onto white Corian. Motion detector lights mounted atop fence posts light the exhibition in a continuous framing and reframing as the viewer traverses through the space. 

“Tarr’s work collapses these symbols onto each other where they remain as what they were, as what they are, and as something ultimately still unknowable.”

 Tarr was born in 1989 to a blue-collar family and raised in the working-class neighborhoods of Pittsburgh. His undergraduate education is in printmaking and sculpture. Tarr received his MFA in studio art at Syracuse University in 2019. Since then, he has shown nationally and internationally, including at Daniels Foyer Gallery at the Dowd Art Gallery, SUNY Cortland, NY; Bunker Projects, Pittsburgh, PA; Das Gift, Berlin, DE; and Monte Vista Projects in Los Angeles. He has been an artist-in-residence at the Axel Haubrok Fahrbereitschaft in Berlin, Germany; Mobile AIR, Berlin, DE; and Trust at Governors Island Artist Residency in NYC.

Tarr lives and works in Syracuse, where he is an instructor at Syracuse University teaching Sculpture, Digital Fabrication and Foundations, and was appointed Pedagogy Facilitator. His work deals with the decay in post-industrial settings and the new myths and narratives that arise in their place. At the core of his practice, he questions when and how emptiness begins to accumulate weight. He is an interdisciplinary artist working across various mediums.