The First Grand Face by Jabari Weathers. “This piece was for a personal worldbuilding project that is still ongoing but has taken some really sharp left turns in the past few years that have caused me to re evaluate the kind of fiction I want to make and create art for. That said, I’m still proud of this piece, and it was a turning point for my relationship with Gouache, which is the medium all five of these shown pieces were rendered in!”
Baltimore, Maryland native Jabari Weathers is a sci-fi/fantasy illustrator and a tabletop roleplaying and narrative game designer with a dark tinge. They are attracted to points of tension and paradox in stories. Consequentially, they are highly conscious of similar instances in real life and how it translates into their work. “My fantastic work doesn’t feel fantastic for me a lot of the time because it’s trying to process my feelings on the tensions that affect my life through surreal and fantastic imagery,” they told TUBE. “Some of what I work to do is try to reconcile the narrative language that I’ve been granted for a predominantly ‘white and male’ market and genre that I recognize hasn’t made an obvious or very visible place for me, a person of color. Leaning into that has challenged me to extract what I like in the media that I consume, what I want to challenge in myself, and empowered me to try to carve a place for myself to creatively share with the world.”
The Edotirs by Jabari Weathers. “The Edotirs is probably the most ‘fun’ and least conceptually wrought of the selection of work here. It was made for a Light Grey Art Lab show that I had the privilege to be considered for this past year. I wanted to play around with perspective and a sort of vast, weird space as it was being curated by two figures that at first seem to inhabit it. I think the idea of the moon being moved around by hand in the sky came from this old Merlin tv special with Sam Neil in the title role that I saw like…17 years ago? I dunno. The piece was a lot of fun, though!”
Fainting Spell by Jabari Weathers. “Made for Month of Fear a few years ago, Fainting Spell was made to reflect on this pattern of fainting that I briefly went through a few years back, as well as just recalling the general feeling. I don’t really remember hitting the floor when I recall what this image was supposed to allude to, I just remember waking up as if I was in a really deep sleep. It was always an unnerving sensation because it felt like I had slept *really* well, but I’d be surrounded by people who’d watched me go down, or would be heard from another room collapsing. This dreamy space is supposed to allude to that sleepiness, while also signaling that feeling of something being very wrong, often with me in reality having to catch up to exactly what…”
The Mask You Know by Jabari Weathers. “This piece was made for Month of Love in the same year as Fainting Spell and was all about the way that we can become intimate with our projections of others when we aren’t careful.”
The Fated Year by Jabari Weathers. “This was the piece used for the poster of my first solo show last March. it was a collection of the 164 originals from the two different Tarot projects I had completed in the prior two years (put together for the actual time spent on them, 8 really intense months) for two different tabletop roleplaying games; Bluebeard’s Bride and 7th Sea.”
