Myra Jago graduated with a BA Fine Art from NCAD in 2009 and went on to pursue an MFA painting at NCAD, which she completed this year. Jago has won a site-specific ELIA commission in Brussels, co-produced a collaborative audience-participatory event and exhibited in The Central Bank, Dame Street.
Jago works mainly in oil, watercolour, pencil and sculpture and her practice centres on ideas about how we negotiate the world. “We straddle the seam between choice and spontaneity, never totally taking charge as our evolutionary hardwiring lingers below the surface. The curious lure of the mirrored image - a blue sky reflected in a street puddle for example - converses with an innate sense rather than the conscious mind. Painting itself can be described in these terms, where space is created out of the flat surface. I use mirroring, where a thing appears apart from itself, to describe this dichotomy. This elusive subject matter has generated tangents of investigation and discovery into the realms of contemporary art, neurology, psychology and physics. I have utilized books as metaphorical motifs to describe this set of circumstances. The hinged seam of the book complies with a subversion of both function and meaning. By mirroring the image in the open book, staging with lighting, photographing and finally painting the still life, the object traditionally associated with information and learning assimilates a new irrationality within its primary form. Instead, images roll into and out of one another, in a loop-like system, similar to the indiscernible division between our voluntary and involuntary thoughts and actions. Furthermore, the added challenge of a puzzle sets off a checklist of stage-by-stage processing, as the eye is drawn back and forth to confirm the authenticity of symmetry, much like a comic book spot-the-difference. Most recently, I have begun to explore this concept with printed silk fabric. Surfaces and tools from the studio, along with the architecture of the space, are allowed into the work. Each motif employed in the construct further expands and reiterates the narrative.”
