Tests w/Red & Brown  2010

Known for her work exploring patterns influenced by science, analysis, and notation, Jaq Chartier’s most recent exhibition, SuperNatural features a series of small, intimate paintings that invite the viewer to step closer and immerse themselves. Featuring minimal, stripped-down forms and lush, inflamed colors, Chartier’s works suggest virulent strains, bacteria, and cells. Though paintings are often viewed as immutable, these works are designed to continue to live and slowly change over time, the materials interacting on a microscopic level. This intentionally mercurial state draws attention to these paintings as natural objects – changing over time. They cannot be, and in fact nothing can be, "above" or "beyond" that most natural state: instability.

Jaq Chartier has been the recipient of a 4Culture Special Projects Grant, an Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Commission Fellowship, and a PONCHO Special Recognition Award from the Seattle Art Museum's Betty Bowen Committee. She was also a 2004 Creative Capital Grant finalist, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award nominee in 2001. Her work was featured on the first Foo Fighters CD in 1995, and in the acclaimed traveling exhibition Gene(sis): Contemporary Art Explores Human Genomics.