Jim Maples wants to know what I’m doing, standing in his Chapman Highway liquor store parking lot, staring at a brick wall.
Jim, owner of Southland Wine & Spirits, puts two and two together when I say I’ve just come from the Candoro Marble Building about a mile down the road, where a painting inspired by the wall is part of Jered Sprecher’s new exhibition Under the Branches.
Now we’re both staring at the wall, trying to catch a glimpse of Jered’s muse. But the fleshy-beige brick isn’t talking. The only distinguishing factor is a large, roughed-up rectangle where a sign used to be. “It was for White Realty or something like that,” Jim says. “When I bought the building 20 years ago, I just tore the sign down. And then it was like, now I gotta scrape all this epoxy crap off. And then I thought, well I’ll just paint over it. I was pretty lazy about it.”
It’s the kind of thing most people would walk past a thousand times without a second thought. But Jered Sprecher isn’t most people. Southland is his neighborhood liquor store, and for years, he felt compelled to photograph the wall whenever he stopped in. He was fascinated by the chaotic, branching patterns left by the epoxy. “It’s this amazing sort of sculptural Jackson Pollock painting on top of the brick wall,” Jered says.
Jered’s approximation, Rivulets, stretches six feet across and stays true to its inspiration in some ways. But where the original is the kind of wall Pink Floyd warned us about—its wildness hastily painted over, sealed and assimilated—Rivuletsreanimates the feral bits. The brick grid and its slapdash epoxy are allowed to coexist. The addition of a ribbon of color and luminescent strands of cobalt give the painting an almost sentient quality.
As Jim rings up my box o’ Bota, he asks me to text him a photo of Rivulets. He says he’ll go visit the gallery soon. As I drive away, Jim is out in the parking lot with an employee, holding up his phone, studying his wall in comparison to my photo of Jered’s painting inspired by Jered’s photographs of Jim’s wall.
Jered is a UT art professor whose work is well-known locally and far beyond. While his paintings have kept busy circulating in cities throughout the country, it’s been a while since Knoxville enjoyed a broad, leisurely glimpse inside Jered’s brain.
A career highlight was his 2017 solo show at the Knoxville Museum of Art, Outside In. Being at KMA gave Jered the square footage, literally and figuratively, to achieve a new creative wingspan. The paintings were so bright, and so big. One spanned an entire wall like wallpaper; others were suspended from the ceiling. I remember feeling weird and buzzy, like I was on a sunny beach watching the ocean perform its eternal cycle of things through a margarita brain freeze and a glitching Instagram filter.
Tri-Star Arts’ gallery in the Candoro Marble Building feels like a dollhouse room in comparison: small, historic, quirky. (I shared its story in a previous column here.) The main gallery space is right-angled like a Tetris piece, with a checkered floor and pane-glass views of Candoro’s dilapidated old fabrication warehouse, which nature has largely reclaimed.
As such, the space is trickier to program than the standard-issue white cube. “I like to give an artist a year-and-a-half to two years of lead time just to sort of process that the work will play with these forces, and that it can be intentional and, in certain cases, site-responsive,” says Brian Jobe, Tri-Star Arts’ director and co-founder.
On this bright, late-winter day, the sun is exercising one of its more subversive talents: creating shadows. The squares of light pouring through one gallery window get helix-twisted against the wall, then again across the floor. These acrobatics of light and perception—whether natural or emitted from a digital screen—can be observed in Jered’s paintings, too.
There are a few key ingredients in the “soup” of Jered’s work. First, there’s usually some sort of underlying structure. “As humans, we tend to like grids and structure as a way to organize our lives,” Jered says. In some pieces, the gridding is obvious–-the canvas itself looks like it was run through a shredder then woven back together. In others, it’s more subtle.
“And then, I find myself looking at weaving in technology and digital technology and different things that inform the culture,” he says. “But also in the room, you see a lot of plants and trees and branches, and that’s the world we live in.” The juxtaposition extends beyond the gallery walls to Candoro’s dilapidated old marble fabrication facility, once a center of cutting-edge industry, now a rusty trellis for kudzu.
Jered is a hunter-gatherer of images from the natural world (and liquor store parking lots, apparently). As far apart as nature and technology might seem, it’s interesting to consider how our engagement with one is colored by the other. What does it mean when, upon spotting the first dwarf iris of the year in my garden, my awe is followed immediately by the urge to snap a photo? How much of what we see is already mediated—framed, filtered, altered—by the technology we can’t seem to put down?
And, of course, there are the larger, more disconcerting conversations that lie beyond the scope of this column. We live in a world on fire—literally—and the questions about how human intervention is reshaping (or unraveling) the natural order are thorny ones. That’s where the tension in Jered’s work lives: in the friction between control and chaos, order and entropy. We crave structure—grids, pixels, neatly coded data points—but nature’s gonna nature, and it only takes a stray moment for things to veer off course.
Jered plays with these disruptions, embracing the moments where precision slips. His paintings often contain shifts—forms interrupted, sections that seem to stutter or ripple. “[With coding] when you lose a couple 1s or 0s in a file, it throws it into a glitch,” Jered says. “So I might sort of glitch myself, or look for moments where, like, it should be this color, but then it’s glitched or shifted or been knocked off center. Something is awry, or something is different, or something’s changed.”
And in that sliver of difference—between what is and what was expected—something new emerges.