Jaq Chartier attended Syracuse University for film, and then obtained her BFA in painting from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and her MFA in painting from the University of Washington, Seattle.

She was a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award nominee, a Creative Capital Grant finalist, and a finalist for the 2011 Contemporary Northwest Art Award at the Portland Art Museum. Her awards include an Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Commission Fellowship, a Purchase Award from the Portable Works Collection of Seattle Public Utilities, and a a Seattle Art Museum Betty Bowen PONCHO Special Recognition Award. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Tacoma Art Museum, Oregon State University in Corvallis, Microsoft, The Allen Institute, Google Cloud Collection, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and most recently collected by the Esbjerg Museum in Denmark.

She lives and works in Seattle, WA

TESTING

A lot of my work is about the feeling of transience and impermanence that I sometimes glimpse under the surface of the day. Curiosity helps me embrace that feeling and find beauty there. I love collecting intriguing sciency images from chromatography and DNA gel electrophoresis, as well as things seen under the microscope and under the sea. Science keeps me inspired by the wondrous. And like a scientist I call my paintings tests because I’m following real questions and running real experiments. I set the stage for materials to interact and reveal hidden chemistries, and the final paintings are the results.

I like to set up tension between a minimal, stripped-down aesthetic and effusive lush color – a type of color that suggests something outside of our ordinary, everyday world, beautiful but also sort of bizarre, inflamed, suggestive of energies that we can’t see. Instead of paint I use my own custom formulas of deeply saturated inks, stains and dyes. Such colors can do things paint can’t do – bleed, shift, and migrate through other layers of paint, or change color, or even completely disappear. The final coating and drying stage reminds me of waiting for a polaroid photo to develop back in the day — all that mysterious whiteness slowly changing while the image emerges.

Time is not a dimension people usually think of for paintings. Even after you know about the testing process underpinning my work it’s tempting to view the paintings as static, frozen moments or phenomena captured in the acrylic film like bugs in amber. But they’re actually slow-motion performances changing imperceptibly over time as the materials continue to interact.

SUNTESTS

Like most painters I was taught to use archival materials and proper painting techniques. My earliest little light tests years ago were just a way of sorting out fugitive colors from those that are stable and lightfast. But over time instead of discarding them I’ve found myself more and more attracted to the additional layer of complexity that such changes suggest and to the very notion of impermanence.

In my SunTests series I’m looking closely at these fragile colors. I design some formulas to shift in hue (such as green-to- pink), while others completely disappear leaving no trace behind. I make small paintings using these light sensitive colors and expose them to sunlight in my studio windows, documenting the changes with a high resolution scanner over many weeks and month. Each digital image is essentially a still frame in a time-lapse movie capturing the fleeting moments as the physical images evolve and dissolve. At the end of the process the paintings no longer exist except as ghosts of their former selves. The final artworks are limited edition archival dye sublimation prints on aluminum—permanent records of transient moments.

Allen Institute
Amgen
Bill & Melinda Gates Research Institute
Capital One
Chambers Hotel, NY
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
Charles Schwab
City of Seattle Portable Works Collection
Google Cloud Collection
Merck
Microsoft
Oregon State University, Corvallis
Partners Healthcare
Progressive Art Collection
Schwartz Art Collection, Harvard Business School
Seattle Public Utilities Portable Works Collection
Swedish Medical Center, Seattle WA
Tacoma Art Museum
University of West Florida
Wellington Management
Esbjerg Museum, Denmark