SACRAMENT PRESENTS
Stiletto by Jaxson Jaffe
Dates: 23 January 2025 – 23 March 2025
Opening Reception: 23 January 2024, 7:30–9:30 PM
Location: Urbana Gallery, 144 10th Ave, New York, NY 10011
Sacrament, in partnership with Urbana Gallery, is pleased to present Stiletto, the first solo exhibition by New York-based artist Jaxson Jaffe. In his debut, Jaffe—a current student at the School of Visual Arts—unveils a series of intimate airbrush paintings that explore the psychic and material residue of his hometown, Atlantic City, New Jersey.
At once cinematic and deeply personal, Stiletto navigates the city’s layered contradictions, where faded glamour meets urban entropy, and nostalgic longing blurs with harsher realities. The exhibition’s title draws from a real BYOB strip club in Atlantic City, operating exclusively from 8 PM to 6 AM on weekends, embodying the strange, precarious glamour of a city teetering between indulgence and decay. Through his small-scale airbrush works, Jaffe reflects on his own coming-of-age within this environment, moving from the detachment of a voyeur to an active participant in the city’s fractured narrative.
Jaffe’s airbrush technique mirrors the city’s duality: its soft gradients and ethereal precision evoke the seductive sheen of Atlantic City’s bygone allure, while its scale draws the viewer into an unsettling intimacy with the subject matter. Cracked facades, neon signs, and desolate interiors emerge as uncanny artifacts, suspended between romanticization and the weight of their actual dilapidation. This tension between the idealized and the real is not merely depicted but felt—an aesthetic reckoning that invites reflection on the roles we inhabit in the places we call home.
