“Imagine an antique shop in the afternoon. Sunlight diffuses through shelves of colorful glass vases and goblets, compotes and all sorts of glittering vessels arranged carefully by hue. Each piece is distinguished by its particularities, its sinuous contours and decorative flourishes, but when seen as a whole arrangement they join and multiply. They overlap and refract, not so much as a kaleidoscope but more like a dream recorded in echoing waves of paint and time. To be enveloped in this phenomenon would be a bit like stepping into a painting by Robin Jebavy.”

-Kat Minerath (excerpt from review of solo show at Lynden Sculpture Garden)

STATEMENT

In my paintings, I experiment with glassware imagery—a reference to our fragile and often precarious human condition—to ask questions about our intimate relationship with the external world. I use simple vessels that are at once functional containers, symbols of poetic thought and memory, and conduits into liminal, ecstatic states of being to explore the fusion of our inner world’s intuitive, unbounded expanse with domestic, private experience. I often incorporate glassware forms that call to mind cathedral interiors to intersect the worlds of painting and architecture, and conflate monumentality with modest, everyday objects. The idiosyncratic, painted edifices that emerge read as both intensely structured and illusory, psychedelic fragments of experience–elemental, mystical utopias that hover before the viewer.

Since 2019, in addition to making acrylic-on-canvas paintings, I’ve experimented with works on paper that I transform into collages. The process of making this work is very intuitive and fast compared to the carefully executed paintings, and tends to yield some intriguing abstraction that reflects the psychedelic and synesthetic tone of the paintings, but with a formally contrasting speed and energy. I’m excited to see how the paintings and collages inform each other in the coming years.