Jessica Simmons: Work on Paper
May 6 – June 11, 2011
Urban Hardwoods in Los Angeles (UHLA) is pleased to announce the solo exhibition of LA-based artist Jessica Simmons. Jessica Simmons is currently showing in the Group Exhibition Alptraum at The Company from April 30 – May 28, 2011.
Through a combination of drawing and printmaking, Simmons’ works on paper explore the tension between the organic and the sterile, the soiled and the sanitary, and the unbound and restrained. Visual references to hair, skin, meat and plastic – an explicitly sterile material also associated with medical and biological waste – collapse the space between the interior and exterior body, thus blurring the demarcation between repulsion and purity. The resulting imagery is vaguely sexual, yet distinctly devoid of references to the masculine and feminine.
In a multi-part process, Simmons creates monoprints using a combination of objects such as hair, skin, cured meat, torn wire mesh window screens, and post-consumer plastic (such as bags or wrapping), all of which can be characterized as discarded, shed, or dismembered. The paper plane becomes a receptacle for the concurrent negative and positive presence of these forms: disembodied and disposed, yet simultaneously existent and accumulated. She builds up the resulting gestural shapes – randomized by the printing process – with detailed, intricate handwork, thereby anchoring a series of measured marks within a wild picture plane. This combination of printing and drawing, which both extracts and extends an object’s form, furthers the tension between the notion of negative and positive presence.
Deliberate handwork is used to overlay gestural marks, and corporeal forms reference translucent cellular bodies. Within all of these works, the paper itself becomes a surface marked by alchemical history. Gesture wrestles with geometry, and abstract forms absorb shadow and emit light.
Jessica Simmons was born in Providence, RI. She received a BA from Brown University in 2007 in Visual Arts and the History of Art and Architecture, and has studied at The Rhode Island School of Design, the Pont Aven School of Contemporary Art in Pont Aven, France, and the Parsons Paris New School of Design. She has worked on projects for artists such as Mel Bochner, Tom Friedman and Ellen Gallagher at Two Palms Press in Manhattan. Jessica has lived and worked in Mumbai, New York, Paris, and Providence, and currently lives in Los Angeles, CA.
Click the image to RSVP for the opening Firday May 6th from 7 to 10pm.
Post Date:
4/26/2011
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