PERSONAL EFFECTS
Roberto Jamora

Cody Gallery, Marymount University
Curated by Jessica Bonness

September 16, 2024 – October 24, 2024
Artist Talk: Thursday September 19, 4pm, Ballston Auditorium

Additional links:

• Image list / viewing room

• PDF version of the press release

• Photos of the public lecture and opening reception by Brian Hollar

Personal Effects is a new iteration of Roberto Jamora’s abstract painting series titled An Inventory of Traces. For Jamora, each gradient is a vignette of an experience, place, or person in an attempt to commit important events of his life to memory via painting. Paint mixed with pumice medium is swiped across the canvas. Simultaneously, illusionistic space is anticipated and denied. A thin trace of color is revealed. Color triggers recollections.

The title, Personal Effects, invokes property that one carries on their person, but what about things carried that are unseen and immaterial? Carrying the loss of a loved one. A person-shaped hole. The family in the Philippines you hold through a Facebook photo and weep. The joys of being under concert lights that make your lover’s skin look neon pink. The sun rising again over the Appalachian Mountains reminds you that we too can rise. Jamora approaches this ongoing series like a sentimental hoarder of memories. Each gradient and incision are both spectacular and everyday, familiar and also distant. The paintings are quiet provocations, asking the viewer to reflect on the meanings and power of color.

A Richmond-based artist and educator, Jamora is an Assistant Professor in the VCUarts Art Foundation Program. He holds an MFA from SUNY Purchase and a BFA from VCU. He has exhibited at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Contemporary Art Center of New Orleans, and the Philippine Consulate in New York, to name a few. Jamora has artwork in collections belonging to the Atlantic Hawks, Capital One, Harvard Kennedy School, and several private collections throughout North America, the Philippines, and the UK. He is represented by Bond Millen Gallery in Richmond and FLXST Contemporary in Chicago.

Cody Gallery is a contemporary art space created as a platform to support the arts and strengthen the arts community at Marymount University and the greater Washington DC area. The gallery is operated by the School of Design + Art at Marymount. Location: 1000 N. Glebe Rd., 2nd Fl., Arlington, VA 22201.

Learn more about Cody Gallery: marymount.edu/cody-gallery