Ampersand is pleased to present HEAD FAKE, an exhibition of new drawings by Bay Area artist Jason Brinkerhoff. We've long known Brinkerhoff as a dedicated collector of anonymous photographs. His eye for vernacular photography, outsider art and scraps of disparate paper ephemera is sharp and the scope of his collecting adventurous. He represents well the figure of a collector as artist, one who does not merely accumulate, but who looks and chooses deliberately with the intent of forming a collection that makes statements much larger than any of its single components. The art practice that is informed by this activity is dynamic. Brinkerhoff embodies at once the figure of a cultural taxonomist, unhinged archivist and self-taught artist who makes singular art pieces. His drawings vigorously engage the visual contours of the source material he celebrates, employing in boundless fashion elements of collage, painting and simple line work in mediums as diverse as graphite, color pencil, wax pastel, acrylic and spray paint.

Brinkerhoff's new drawings are a continuation of his ongoing study of the female form, cumulatively titled Some Women, which he debuted in a solo exhibition at White Columns (New York) in spring, 2012. Ever evolving in his practice, he presents here a set of drawings that are abstracted variants of women wrestlers and fighters sourced from the theatrics of old pinup photos and video stills from Olympic wrestling matches on YouTube. This new direction puts female figures in motion while simultaneously creating tension between the two, both within the formal constraints of the drawing and the undefined meaning of their physical relationship, made ambiguous by Brinkerhoff's open-ended treatment. A second set of 12 drawings presents isolated head fragments that act as a corollary to HEAD FAKE, the small edition book that we have designed and published to coincide with the exhibition. Simply framed and mounted to rag, the heads float amid ample white space at the intersection of a large graphite X. Employed not merely as a formal centering device, the X also acts as a confluence point for the multi-stylistic touch that is but one conceptual concern in Brinkerhoff's multifaceted project.

Untitled, 2013
Graphite, colored pencil, wax pastel, acrylic and spray paint on paper
9 7/8 x 12 7/8 in.