Artist: Jarvis Boyland

MAMOTH presents Bad Attitude—the second solo exhibition by Los Angeles–based painter Jarvis Boyland (b. 1995, Memphis, Tennessee).

In Bad Attitude, Boyland presents a series of oil paintings based on lived encounters. Across this exhibition, melancholy intermingles with the warmth and delicacy of private, contemplative settings.

Tensions between life and loss are made visible in moments that are both tender and unsettling. The warm glow of light spilling across the closely cropped face in Sunglasses (Oliver Goldsmith), and across the figure tending a plant in Prune—cloth in one hand, watering can in the other—stands in stark contrast to the stillness of extinguished life in Grave #2, where a small eastern bluebird lies lifeless, its wings splayed across the canvas.

With composure and defiance, the figures in Boyland’s paintings occupy fictitious environments sutured from personal and found photographs. Continuing the artist’s fascination with interiority, paintings such as Living Room present a subtle tension through the depiction of careful, contained body language, as two elegantly dressed men kneel, looking away from the viewer—an emotionally charged awkwardness that gestures toward the fragility of intimate connection.