Time traveling

Artist Jamal Thorne’s roots are in drawing, and even in his most recent abstract paintings, it shows. His exhibition “Bootleg DeLorean” at Kingston Gallery through April 1, is an artistic treasure hunt, with drawings at the end of the map.

“As an African American male, I’m told I need to have these connections to the past,” says Thorne. He found himself struggling to relate to famous figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and others with whom he was supposed to have a cultural relationship. And so he draws them, in textural, mixed-media paintings sometimes 13 or more layers deep.

After creating the layers, he digs into them with chisels, knives and even a sander. “It’s a savage process, digging into the past,” he says. “And the most I can do is reclaim a piece.” Through the gashes and nips he’s created in his own work, you can catch glimpses of portraits and items of cultural significance. In the creation of his work, the artist is learning to discover and connect with his African American heritage.

Grid mentality

In each piece, squares are the grounding motif. Thorne says he noticed people living their lives in grids, to make sense of the everyday. In his works, he disrupts that grid by placing squares at odd angles across the paper. Yet, despite their misplacement, the squares continue to provide stability to the emotional artworks. They serve as an optical foothold for the viewer.

Thorne’s desire to connect with, or at least understand, the past also stems from current events. “I think about the current political climate and I feel we need to go back into history and figure out where we went wrong,” he says. The exhibit title, “Bootleg DeLorean,” refers to the 1985 movie “Back to the Future,” in which the protagonist travels back in time in his DeLorean car. These paintings are Thorne’s own vehicle to the past, but in an imperfect way.

Just as in the human experience of history, pieces of Thorne’s paintings are lost along with way. In his favorite piece, “Red #2,” he says, he lost an exceptionally well-drawn piece of rope in the layers on paint. He may know it’s there, but the audience will never experience that piece of his history.

The Kingston Gallery show contains five of these new works, and Thorne has plans for further development in the series. He hopes to further his own knowledge of color and to incorporate famous paintings into his artistic archaeology.

Thorne hopes the pieces will spark a dialogue about the past that can be used to inform contemporary issues. He says, “There’s this push and pull between past and present. It allows for another layer of conversation.”