Var Gallery is excited to announce the opening of Jay Arpin's solo exhibition Ninety-Nine Percent.​

 

Jay Arpin (b. 1967, Green Bay, WI) is a contemporary printmaker working out of his home studio in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. He discovered his passion for printmaking at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, earning his BFA in 1994. Arpin’s work draws from a wide range of influences, including 20th-century American printmaking, film noir, comic book art, German Expressionism, and music. His recent series examine societal erosion through the intersecting lenses of nature, industry, urban environments, technology, and institutional corruption. Arpin exhibits widely across the United States and was featured in the Brussels-based printmaking journal Magazine Actuel in 2025.

 

"Ninety-nine Percent is a collection of relief prints that examines the concentration of wealth, power, and influence in contemporary American society. Drawing on the visual language and social legacy of American printmaking throughout the twentieth century, the work employs a medium historically associated with labor, political activism, and public communication to address issues that continue to shape everyday life.

 

The exhibition explores oligarchy, corporatocracy, institutional corruption, and the ways political power is reinforced through economic interests and the use of Christianity as a means of social control. It is an invitation to reflect on inequality, question accepted institutions and examine the systems that allow a small minority, the one percent, to wield disproportionate influence over the lives of the many."

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