Jessica Snow
Beyond A Reasonable Doubt (2010), acrylic and oil on linen, 24 x 24 in.
Zoe’s Fourteen Hundredth Kick (2008), acrylic and oil on canvas, 50 x 50 in.
Architecture’s Internal Logic (2008), acrylic and oil on canvas, 32 x 42 in.
Altruism (2009), acrylic on paper, 18 x 18 in.
Mechanism Of A Passing Moment (2007), oil on linen, 24 x 24 in.
A Most Likely Outcome (2008), oil on linen, 36 x 44 in.
Hearing A Who (2007), acrylic on paper, 10 x 12 in.
Artist Statement
How does the mind engage with abstract painting? This is a question which has interested me as long as I have been painting. I see painting functioning as a psychic screen, onto which consciousness is projected. This outward projection constitutes a self-organizing map, and in this it becomes a “representation” of selfhood. A painting is a diagram of subjectivity which interacts with the viewer, and through its outward projection of meaning becomes organized as a subject.
Each of my paintings expresses a new possibility, an opening into a new direction where meaning is continually at play and in flux. The most interesting pieces are those in which something has been left unresolved; its reason for being has not been entirely spelled out for the viewer or even for the artist. In the painting’s openness it becomes a reflection of the self; the meaning of the painting unfolds in its unspoken dialogue with the viewer.
Memory filters through the imagination; visual and emotional memory. Cities seen, love’s body, nature’s bittersweet dawning. These fleeting moments constitute the wonder of the world. Much like a city is a structural diagram of human history, a painting could be conceived as a structural diagram of the human psyche. Like cities and dreams, the internal logic (or non-logic) of painting is structured upon absurd rules and deceitful perspectives. In my work, receding spaces suddenly abut against flat planes; geometric stability is overthrown as are sensical spatial relationships. Much like the human psyche, contradictions are usually left unresolved.
Calmness and chaos hang in the balance in my paintings, and it is this balance which usually determines the success of the work. It is in this state of simultaneously held oppositions that we can discover for a moment that ever-elusive enigma of self-hood.
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