CHRIS JEHLY: “My work is derived from personal fears, anxieties, and confessions, and the sometimes real, sometimes imagined eruptions of the hidden chaos and threatening forces underlying my experience of everyday reality. Childhood obsessions with cartoons and comic books, as well as my participation in graffiti and mural painting inform my approach and execution. Using existing comic book and cartoon illustrations, death metal lyrics and album art, and impromptu visual cues in film, news media, etc., my work is manipulating the manipulator and reconfiguring pre­existing imagery, which offers itself up for stretching, twisting, dissecting and suturing together, and which I then force into a rhythmic and traumatic juxtaposition with imagery that appears to be in conflict but is in actuality part of the same universe in my experience. I’m interested in exploring how my work can mask, distort, and amplify the perception of natural disaster, self­-image and memory, and the candy­-coated brutality of everyday life.”