About Mike Jacobs

Mike Jacobs received his BFA from the University of Cincinnati in 2000. He lived and worked in Cincinnati, Ohio as an artist and Industrial Design Model Technician until 2015. Jacobs earned his MFA from the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University in 2019. While at ASU Mike has been the recipient of grants, awards, and scholarships from the Martin Wong Foundation, Arizona Artists Guild, the Gayle J. Novak & Robert D. Cocke Award in Painting, and the Gerry Grout Visual Arts Scholarship. He has exhibited his work nationally at the FotoFocus Biennial, Cincinnati, OH, Torrance Art Museum in Torrance, CA, Bentley Gallery, Phoenix, AZ, the Baton Rouge Gallery Center for Contemporary Art, Baton Rouge, LA, internationally at the ARTE Galería, Quito, Ecuador, and the RAE space for contemporary art Berlin, Federal Republic of Germany. Jacobs is currently based in Phoenix, Arizona.. 

About the work

Mike Jacobs mixes assemblage aesthetics with formalist interventions throughout his compositional choices. As a truly hybrid producer, both figurative and abstract elements abound in Jacob’s art practice, where nearly every kind of motif can enter into the mix. The use of an edited image, a cropped sequence and an unexpected juxtaposition all speak to the fragmentation and re-composition of phenomenological experience as a naturalized part of everyday life in the twenty-first century.

In this way, Jacob’s work provides us with a critical commentary about how perception works in a culture of constant acceleration by selecting iconographic moments that allude to his original source material, but which also transform it into something wholly new. The scrim of images he pulls from life, advertising, and art history are all woven together into a seamless whole that makes the pictorial field function like so many interlocking parts of the mind. As such, Jacob’s art is nothing less than a confrontation with the kinds of visual details that serve to establish an immediate and perfunctory relationship between a discrete object of perception and the person viewing it. 

It is this unique quality of absolute specificity and the draw of visual intimacy that comprises the most significant aspect of Jacob’s oeuvre. Taken on the whole, the experience of his work provides us with a visual epiphany that touches on the ineffable. There are few artists working today where the fusion of the sculptural, the painterly and the post-painterly have taken on the kind of expanded dimensions that have made Jacob’s work into one of the most well-recognized aesthetics in the valley of the sun as well as in the greater art world, both of which he is sure to continue to have an impact on for years to come.