Clayface Painting

At a very young age, moving stunned and alone in his creative adolescence, Jalen Khalil Lacy was forced to confront the realities of the human condition - as they applied to a black artist in a highly turbulent, and guarded world. On the day his instructor pronounced to him that members of his race and background couldn't possibly produce work of the same emotional magnitude as the "old masters", he's been incensed to conjure up work that overlooks, not challenges, every possible construct of exclusion that exists in the honeycombs of the creative realm. His work is the product of disregard. It is a tangible representation of the very fiber by which he navigates his life. To own a Khalil is to clutch a fragment of the blurred line prioritizing aesthetic and composition. Khalil is an artist of construct, and his work maintains the equilibrium between bustling modernism and whimsical expressionism. Through a mixed media exploration of counterspace, shape, color, light, and anthropomorphic gesture, he presents every viewer with an unparalleled notion of inquisition and invitation: if not to understand, then to feel and see what it means to be human in his corner of reality.