Alexander/Heath Contemporary
is to proud to present
an exhibition by painter
JESSIE MANN, PhD.
November 5 through November 26, 2021
OPENING RECEPTION:
Art-by-Night Friday, November 5th, 2021, 6-10 pm
CLOSING RECEPTION:
Friday, November 5th, 2021, 7-9 pm
Refreshments / Parking Map
Gallery located at Campbell Ave SW and 5th Street
(Enter on 5th Street between Campbell Ave SW and Rorer Ave
Opening Reception, November 5, 2021
Artist Statement
I credit my artistic passion to my childhood exposure to art and artmaking. As I developed my sense of the world, understanding art and the cognitive processes engaged by it were themes I latched onto. My practice as a scientist is not very different from my practice as an artist. It is a scientific interest in both our perception of reality and the artistic expansion of perception and reality that informs and inspires my paintings.
As a painter I am experimenting with what visual and perceptual effects I can create, how I can push the experience of a painting into new spaces, and also how I can push the paint itself into new visual purpose. By using both abstract forms, and representational feeling, I engage the viewer in the act of creating the painting. In this manner the viewer is forced to see the painting in a way that reflects how we perceive things- as a mix between what data is received and what data is filled in through simulational processes. By filling in or imagining meaning the viewer is engaged with the painted scene in much the same way we interact with the world when we create and fill in what we see, (e.g the way we overcome inversions and blind spots). This examination of the way we digest reality, with imagination and intuition, raises questions about where exactly the boundary lies between what exists out there, and what we experience and create. The specific splatter, which I create, and the unique way the paint mixes and drips for me, is the interaction between myself, and the painting’s assertion of itself. This becomes the perfect metaphor for the way we interact with and experience reality, a mix between our perceptual assertions and conscious experience and the assertion, the will to be, of the world, the image.
BIO
Dr. Jessie Mann was born in Lexington, Virginia where her early education as a precocious artist was overseen by her mother, photographer Sally Mann, and painter Cy Twombly. Jessie began showing her paintings in her 20’s and a photographic collaboration with the artist Len Prince completed a national tour and found placement in collections at the St. Petersburg Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Getty Museum. This work gained press attention from the New Yorker, The Washington Post, and ArtNews to name a few. Her paintings have been exhibited in solo and group shows up and down the east coast, with placements in corporate and private American collections. By her late 20’s Mann had invented a new alternative media process, using lasers to expose photographic paper, a process Mann called Electromagnetograms. This work was part of the Mountain Lake Workshop series, and featured in a recent book by Longwood press on the workshop. In her 30’s Mann completed a masters degree in Science, Technology, and Society, contributing a chapter on “Art and Technology” to a Routledge text on the philosophy of technology, and then a doctorate in Neuroscience from Virginia Tech Carilion’s Translational Biology, Medicine, and Health program in Roanoke, Virginia. She currently works as a pediatric neurorehabilitationist at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute in Roanoke, Virginia. When she isn’t writing grant applications or playing with kids, she is making or playing with her rescue dog, a big, goofy, Malinois named Mister.
AFTER OPENING RECEPTION, BY APPOINTMENT ONLY:
Cell: Edward Hettig, 607.226.2473
Contact via Email: hettig@alexander-heath.com