Jaik Faulk is an artist/curator practicing in Lafayette Louisiana. In 2014, he returned home to Lafayette after spending 15 years on the West Coast where he played an active part in the artist communities of Portland, Oregon and San Francisco California. Faulk received his MFA in 2013 from the San Francisco Art Institute and his BA from Portland State University in 2005. It was in these two cities that he developed an approach to curation and collaboration with artists that he currently implements in his hometown. He has most recently guest curated an exhibition Cosmik Folk / Cosmic Land at Staple Goods in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is represented in Portland Oregon by NATIONALE.
Faulk’s most recent exhibition in Los Angeles during the fall of 2023, saw him create a number of works which use negative space and musical timing to rethink early modernist approaches, it was titled Modern Times, Crooked Songs. His current yield of paintings from the spring of 2024 sees this approach and raises the ante, adding complexity as the space within the canvas becomes more curious and suggestive. In the arc of his art making Faulk is letting go of assertions and embracing a process of questioning within each painting.
Over the course of his career, Faulk has returned again and again to abstraction within painting that is a grab bag of references. At times the depth of space is shallow and as flat as a modernist cut-out, a conversation in an elevator. The next opens up slightly to a table-top or room. The galaxy appears rarely if ever as it should be, but more stylized. The core of Faulk’s investigation is the medium of paint, it is the host of traditional approaches and motifs to be found in the history of painting that drives his love and curiosity for making.