Josh Jefferson has made visual art since the late 1990s. With a singular drive, he combines material experimentation and visual simplicity in work that engages comics, collage, and a fetish for the lush verso of antiquated source material—a tactile albeit intellectual result of his fondness for the past. He is as unafraid of forging a face with three strokes of the brush and pen-and-ink splatter as he is of layering a dozen disparately drawn discards into a harmonious whole. Though Jefferson doesn’t seem to concern himself with end results, the laboratory’s immediacy is his prevailing enchantment. He makes marks with learned abandon; he erases them with naiveté and concision. His practical approach is alternately reverent and iconoclastic. Whether rubbing frottage over vinyl lettering, painting with a broad brush, or drawing with concentrated attention, he makes work that is a celebration of abandon and control.

– Scott Zieher