ARTWORK

Since 2008, Jay Dart has been exhibiting works from the Yawnder series in galleries and art fairs throughout North America and Europe. Visit the links below to see drawings from specific chapters in this series that were included in various venues over the years. Scroll down for more info and photos from Jay Dart’s exhibitions. 

Most recent works from the Final Chapters
and the Postcards From Yawnder
PAST CHAPTERS (2008-2019)
Chapter I: Wanderer of Yawnder
Chapter II: Further Over Yawnder
Chapter III: Now Entering Beyawnder
Chapter IV: Old Fields, Revisited

Catalogues of works available for purchase can be viewed in the Shop.

Over more than a decade, Jay Dart has created approximately 300 pieces for the Yawnder series which includes not only drawings but also mixed-media works, installations, animated videos and bookworks that add another dimension to the works on paper. For each exhibition, Dart expands on the ongoing narrative centred on his alter ego Jiggs’ odyssey. He creates experiential exhibitions for those who enter the gallery spaces by including mixed media pieces that bring elements from his two-dimensional works to life as well as interactive installations in order for people to engage with his imaginative world. Dart continues to exhibit works from this series in two ways: he presents never before seen images from the narrative through new works and he also creates exhibitions that provide an overview of the world through new and past works.

In 2022, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the inception of his Yawnder series, Jay Dart exhibited new drawings alongside rarely-exhibited pieces from this body of work in a touring exhibition titled Ten Hundred Years of Yawns & Dust. This series featured the exploits of his alter ego, Jiggs, and a cast of wanderers in a whimsical mindscape through which a narrative continues to evolve about the mystical nature of inspiration, the quest for innovative creation, and the dissemination of ideas. Within this conceptually layered world, Dart explores themes of identity, innocence lost/recovered, isolation, ecology, and interconnection in modern society. 

Some of the pieces from the Yawnder archives that are included in this exhibition were featured in his bookworks Where Yawns Go, the first volume of a series recounts the narrative within his imagined world, and the Field Guide to Yawnder, a catalogue for his first touring public gallery exhibition which is also available at the Art Gallery of Ontario.