Waking Dreams

Thinkspace Gallery is a contemporary art gallery located in Los Angeles, California, known for its focus on urban, pop surrealism, and street art. Founded in 2005, the gallery has gained a reputation for showcasing cutting-edge, emerging artists who blend traditional and modern artistic styles. Thinkspace is celebrated for promoting contemporary artists whose works explore themes of fantasy, the surreal, and the experimental, making it a pivotal space in the art toy and street art communities. Thinkspace is pleased to present More Human Than Human, featuring new work by Canadian artist Jacub Gagnon in the solo gallery. Gagnon is one of Toronto’s emerging contemporary talents. The artist’s paintings are composed of dramatic expanses of pitch black negative space, populated by colorful hyper-realist renderings of wildlife in whimsical situations. The little creatures of Gagnon’s imaginings surrealistically activate human objects with both absurd and adorable end results. Meticulously detailed and rendered, with the application of delicate layers, Gagnon’s colors and textures are jewel like. The artist’s scenarios are those of fantasy, summoned by an unfettered imagination and uninhibited by the restrictive logic of reality. Gagnon probes the fine line between the innocuous and the sinister, effortlessly subverting the order of the natural world. The work combines the preciousness of miniaturization with the whimsy of fantastical narrative. At times uncanny and dark in their unlikely combinations, the pieces activate unprecedented relationships between the animal and human worlds, and transfigure wild animals into anthropomorphic guises; like eerie little impostors of the human. We are seduced by a detailed and luminous surface, and fascinated by its circus of creatures. The paintings are almost Baroque in their drama and intensity, but undeniably contemporary Acrylic paint is fast drying paint containing pigment suspension in acrylic polymer emulsion. Acrylic paints can be diluted with water, but become water-resistant when dry. Depending on how much the paint is diluted (with water) or modified with acrylic gels, media, or pastes, the finished acrylic painting can resemble a watercolor or an oil painting, or have its own unique characteristics not attainable with other media. Jacub Gagnon, artist, (06/02/87) Having graduated in 2009 holding a BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD), Jacub Gagnon is one of Toronto’s great emerging contemporary artists. Jacub is known for his curious backgrounds of void space, using a spotlight to emphasize whimsical representations of naive fauna, which are placed at bizarre odds with human objects. Through the use of meticulous blending, layers, and remarkable detail, Jacub tells the story of a world that is sweet as well as disturbing, a showcase of how humans manipulate and borrow from nature. Using small brushes and handling them as he would a pencil, Jacub is able to achieve an illustrative quality that edges into the peculiar world of Pop Surrealism. This colourful, almost child-like fantasy renders the troubling issues that face the habitats and species of our time into otherworldly depictions that capture the imagination. Email: Jacubgagnon@gmail.com