Jonah Meyer (b. 1969) is an interdisciplinary artist and craftsman living and working in the mid-Hudson Valley. Meyer grew up homesteading land with his family. His parents Anne and Jim Meyer created a rural Pennsylvania life out of their respective crafts of pottery and sculpting and a desire to make sustainable choices. He and his siblings were folded into this lifestyle harvesting firewood and growing food, without television and a mile walk to the school bus, he gained a sense of what could be accomplished in a day or a season. After attending rural PA high school he continued his studies of the arts at RISD where his parents had also gone to school and then in Europe; there he began painting under the influences of Donald Bachelor, Phillip Guston, and Francisco Goya. Meyer became fascinated by the symbols and decorations that adorned ancient buildings he saw as a student in Rome, and he brought both Bachelor’s obsession with the motifs of daily life and the Romans’ tendency to signpost into the paintings and sculpture of his post-grad years. To this day Meyer continues to use symbols and adornments as a means of self-inquiry and portraiture, many of which harken back to the complexity of his Pennsylvania upbringing: hearts, skulls, rainbows, water droplets, sunbursts, and guns (Meyer received a gun for his thirteenth birthday). His work rides the edge of abstraction and narrative, and seeks to create a world in which both can be true.
His most recent series, Worst Case Scenario, was showcased this summer at TAYLOE PIGGOTT GALLERY in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The inspiration for this body of work came from the necessity to find balance during a time of upheaval and uncertainty. He began with wood carving as the material at hand. But as the fabric of society was under scrutiny and the divisions widened, the sharp edges and aggression that is embedded within the creation of silver sculptures, was the natural next step in Meyer's creative process. He eventually began to paint and draw, as an exploration of joy, with an array of colors that harken back to his vivid memories of childhood wisdom; while working to stay true to his mode of expression through symbols and motifs of the contemporary and the ancient in reference to the eternal cycle of life, death, and rebirth.
In 2017, Meyer debuted his series, How the West was Won, in his Rhinebeck Showroom. This body of work seeks to investigate U.S. transgressions against Native Americans and the tools of genocide white men wielded—particularly in the late 19th century throughout the Western frontier. Underlying the project is Meyer’s desire to reconcile his rejection of a culture that continues to define masculinity in terms of dominance and violence, while also acknowledging that this history of racism and land theft is a lineage to which Meyer belongs. Still, these questions are nearly cartoonish in the pieces themselves – paintings, wall sculptures, furniture pieces, and prints, all of which are grounded in Meyer’s background as a woodworker. There’s the sense that the work is ultimately a world that invites children to enter despite the trauma implicit in its imagery.