About the Artist

b. 1969, Nanticoke, Pennsylvania. Lives and works in San Diego, CA and Tijuana, Mexico.

Intuitive and elegantly raw-boned, Wassell’s symbolism-loaded tangle of work is a pleasurable mystery borne by contradiction. The intensity and refinement inspired by his youth in Japan battle the later, seductive excesses of three thousand long nights in pre-Katrina New Orleans.

As a skater kid in Yokosuka, a student of Fine Art at VCU, a chef in the French Quarter, printmaker, or percussionist with actionist art group Crash Worship ADRV, Wassell has always carved his own path without hesitation or restraint.

With a partly amputated hand, smoke-stung vision and a bit of brandy in the company of Bergson, Motherwell and Lynch, Wassell cuts up the cubist vocabulary and rises above the copycat detritus of his generation.

The result is work that is uniquely authentic, personal and sublime. [BCN]

Artist Statement

The purpose of my work is to witness and give testament to the downfall of our modern empire - this catastrophic human era. My obsession is fed by entropy, crumbling infrastructure, and the Japanese aesthetic philosophy of wabi sabi. Channeling crude cave art scrawlings and the graffiti of ancient Rome is an instinctive response to the cold precision of a sterile, omnipresent and increasingly technological neoteric world.

And so drawing, the raw architectural bones of painting, has become the root core of these works. This chain of blind contour drawings is an effort to create lines and forms that exist unselfconsciously - pure and spontaneous in nature, like children’s renderings.

Our world is a cacophony of data - grocery lists, architectural sketches, telltale imperfections, assembly instructions, and unintended poetry that is echoed in my work, a blueprint for a perpetual Rube Goldberg machine. The odd intrusion of text in the paintings seem to me like parables that began emphatically then collapse into themselves, drawing into question their own integrity. My work process evolves in churning seasons, a deathless search for the ideal vocabulary to express the unspeakable.