Jeff Colson

Jeff Colson grew up near the oil fields just north of Bakersfield, California.  His father was a social worker whose do-it-yourself aesthetic, making everything from toys to homemade life jackets, informed Colson’s own identity as a “crackpot tinkerer.” 

In his sculpture, Colson refers to both that quirky, by-the-seat-of-your-pants decision-making process and Modernism’s purist grid.  The sculptures are fabricated from both personal and cultural memory, often without referencing specific objects or images.  The resulting forms are familiar, but aren’t real.  The ambiguous quality of the “fabricated” object that is real and isn’t “real” registers the distortions of memory on “remembered” images and/or events.

Colson’s sculptures are physical documents of remembered reality.   The sense of history is also literal as each piece can take months, even years to make.

Jeff Colson graduated from California State College, Bakersfield.  His work is in the Collection of Count Giuseppe Panza di Buomo at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angles; the Sammlung Rosenkranz Foundation in Wuppertal, Germany; the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California; and in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s permanent collection.  He is represented by Ace Gallery in Los Angeles.