About Our Art...
Jim Neeley grew up in the Midwest, where his mother was the fine furniture and home accessories buyer for a family-owned specialty store in Bloomington. Early on Jim was “merchandising” and designing everything from his bedroom to elaborate costumes and sets for performances staged for family audiences. After graduating from Illinois State University, his first “income tax paying” job was as a window designer at Roland’s department store. Later moving to Chicago, Jim began what would be a 15-year career with specialty store retailer I. Magnin; the last position he held was Vice President of Visual Merchandising for the 25-store chain.
Leaving corporate retail to pursue a totally new adventure, Jim conceptualized and created a unique California wine country bistro. During this time, he cofounded Tzabaco along with his longtime partner, a men’s retail concept and catalog, and served as Creative Director for the brand. After selling Tzabaco, he went on to pursue another longtime passion by opening a retail and wholesale antique business specializing in an offbeat and decorative mix of merchandise. The unique showroom presentation led to interior design projects for both global brands and private clients.
In 2000 Jim cofounded Wisecracker Design, an interior design business focusing on residential, retail, and hospitality projects. His previous career experiences, extensive travel, and an eye for good design that goes all the way back to childhood equipped him to bring a unique style to his projects. His interior design is classic and timeless, appropriate, luxurious, and casual at the same time. And all his projects are mixed with an eclectic, slightly offbeat point of view.
In 2017, the local native returned to his hometown after 30-plus years in California. After retiring from the “9 to 5” in 2018, Neeley focused his creativity on studio art. This interest in making art had laid dormant since his college days. His first efforts in the studio centered around assemblage, complex 3D compositions that integrated found objects in labor-intensive, highly refined, monochromatic “boxes” or constructions. In 2020 during the early dark days of the pandemic, Neeley (like many) sought escape. That escape took the form of a 2D collage with an emphasis on color, pattern, fantasy, nostalgia, cool, and always the Wisecracker signature irreverence and whimsey. Collage continues to stimulate and interest the artist. It challenges him to reinvent and evolve the shape and form it takes.
About The Gallery On Display:
A new series of collage studies by artist Jim Neeley | wisecracker studio explores, celebrates, and commemorates the stuff that fascinates him. The places, events, people, and things that have made an indelible impression for known and unknown reasons. These “commemorative stamps” represent the lasting, symbolic, and legendary images impressed on the artist’s mind. There is nothing to be gained by trying to understand why the artist chose these specific yet random subjects. That would be a fool’s errand. Why did Hostess Twinkies make the creative cut instead of Hostess Snoballs?
Neeley’s fingerprints are all over this latest series: eye-popping and offbeat color combinations, odd compositions, unapologetic imperfections, layered patterns, native images captured by the artist on his iPhone over the years, and photos discovered by tumbling deep into the internet mole hole. This is an old-school collage. Each piece is unique; all the elements have been cut by hand. These works are presented on custom-cut hardboard “canvases” with an edge profile that is eminently iconic—the postage stamp. The expression “global village” absolutely applies here: Lejla, a CNC programmer in Bosnia, took Neeley’s pencil sketches and created a file that was emailed to a cabinetmaker in Kankakee, Illinois, who turned that file into precisely laser-cut boards for an artist in Bloomington.
The intent of Neeley’s FOREVER ICONIC series is to allow viewers to lose themselves in the colorful confections, to find a minute to Google the more obscure subjects, to escape everyday life, and to wander the trails of Wisecrackerlandia with this curious and eccentric mind.
