Jared Pankin

I would never hang this work in my home yet since I first laid eyes on it I have been intrigued. Jared Pankin is an L.A. based artist represented by the Carl Berg Gallery.
Despite its warm and fuzzy look the art does not exude a warm and fuzzy feeling. Using seemingly random materials like wood, sawdust, fake fur, carpet remnants and glass eyeballs, Mr. Pankin creates works that are too complex for a lodge wall yet too taxidermy for my home.
The appeal in his work is the small twists. The subtleties unfortunately are lost in renditions of his work so I will speak from intimate experience that these works are talented. I studied three of his works: Hog Wild (pictured above), Stanley (pictured bellow) and Half Knot (below, below). I taught them, I created lectures based on these pieces. I walked in to the gallery, day after day and appreciated them more each time. According to Rebecca McGrew “his [] work evolved into intimate natural history dioramas, followed by sculptures that merged a lone hand-crafted tree to massive accumulations of chunks of wood.” Stanley (2008) looks like an exploded mountain goat. Mostly the innards are made up of chunks of wood that look more like scraps put together than something methodically planned. A single unrealistically tall palm tree ‘grows’ from this construction. What it all means I cannot tell you but the way it make you feel like is the talent. Mr. Pankin says: “my work embraces elements of science, fact and fiction”. This statement holds true. His works are neither fact nor fiction and if science can produce a tree growing out of a goat’s ass then Mr. Pankin is a crystal ball gazer.