Jack Jubb: Saturday Night Live

Edel Assanti is pleased to present Saturday Night Live, an online exhibition of seven new paintings by Jack Jubb (b. 1993, UK) that mostly depict iconic SNL impersonations as a means to reflect on culture and politics.

Jubb’s paintings of late-night sketch comedy performances derive from his habit of playing SNL sketches in his workspace. As the archive of decades-old clips streams continuously on YouTube, the background media becomes intertwined with the flow state of painting and acts as a buffer to the solipsism of the studio. 

Welcoming this cast of previous hosts into his paintings, Jubb reflects on the ephemeral nature of SNL sketches in contrast to the permanent archive of the Internet, examining the ways in which images decay and become inscrutable over time. The sense of uncanny permeating Jubb’s paintings is magnified through his predilection for glossy surfaces and a muted colour palette, as well as his employment of an airbrush and thinned-down paint, introducing a degree of degradation or blur to his compositions.

Jubb’s portraits of parodies illustrate the way in which the post-9/11 era was experienced through the edgy satire, which aimed to exaggerate and meme-ify the idiosyncrasies of politicians. The affable performance of Will Ferrell as George W. Bush is juxtaposed with the strange synthesis of Janet Jackson as Condoleezza Rice, a performance that saw Jackson reference her notorious Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction to infuse a sketch about the Iraq War with an uncomfortable levity. 

The eerie presence of global historic events in Jubb’s works is punctured by tongue-in-cheek humour, echoing the original SNL performances, whilst also probing the relationship between satire and contemporary politics. In the painting taken from an episode that aired following Donald Trump’s election in 2016, Kate McKinnon delivers an elegiac rendition of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ while dressed as Hillary Clinton, a sketch that for some was emblematic of the self-pity that was prevalent amongst Democrats.