.

Born 1982, Salt Lake City, UT
Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

EDUCATION
2005 BFA Otis College of Art and Design
2004 Pont-Aven School of Contemporary Art, Brittany, France
2008 Mountain School of Art
2013 MFA Otis College of Art and Design

SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2008 
Jessica Minckley Solo Exhibition, Carl Berg Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
The Year of the ___, Sea and Space Explorations, Eagle Rock, CA 

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2012
All My Gilberts, MFA Candidate Mid-Residency Exhibition, Bolsky Gallery, Otis College, Los Angeles, CA

2011
The Warmth I Feel Is So Cold, MURDERTOWN, Chicago, IL
Collective Show, L.A., curated by Elephant, Los Angeles, CA

2010
On Seeing: An Internet Exhibition, curated by Annie Buckley, Huffington Post
International Mail Art Show: In Honor and Memory of Judith A. Hoffberg, Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA
Go West, curated by Micol Hebron, Salt Lake Art Center, Salt Lake City, UT
In Conversation, PØST, Los Angeles, CA
Mobile Uploads Exhibition, organized by Amanda Schmitt, Sloane NYC, New York, NY
Workspace Selects, Curated by Daniel Ingroff, HOUSE ON GENESEE, Los Angeles, CA
Session_7_Words, with Krabbesholm Højskole, Four Boxes Gallery, Denmark

2009
Session_7_Words, Am Nuden Da, London, UK
I'm Gorgeous Inside, Five Thirty Three, Los Angeles, CA
ULLI AND LUCRECIA’S LUSTIGE GRUPPENAUSSTELLUNG MIT PARTY, Five Thirty Three, Los Angeles, CA
Animal Attraction, Ambient Art Projects, Las Vegas, NV

2008
Ornament is a Crime, The Fine Arts Building, Los Angeles, CA
Fall Collection, Kreiling &, Los Angeles, CA
Reclaiming: Otis 90th Anniversary Alumni Exhibition (catalog), Los Angeles, CA
New Wave, Carl Berg Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
General Electric, Curated by Lia Trinka-Browner, Projects Presents, Los Angeles, CA
2008 Mountain School of Art exhibition, East Pico Studios, Los Angeles, CA

2007 
The Object, Carl Berg Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Alter-Ego, The Foundation for Art Resources, Highland Park, CA
On Death & Drawing, Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
Come On, Feel the Whatever, Concordia University, Austin, TX

2006 
Captive: Animal Imagery In Contemporary Art, Curated by Carol Cheh and Kristen Raizada, Cal State University, Long Beach, CA
Baby’s All Grown Up, Marvimon House, Chinatown, CA
Debut, Carl Berg Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
MFA Invitational, Roski MFA Gallery, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA

2005 
Untitled Group Show, L.A. Louver Gallery, Venice, CA
Rogue Wave 2005 (catalog), L.A. Louver Gallery, Venice, CA
Immodest Proposals, Buffalo Bayou Art Park, Houston, TX
Sights. Sites. Size. Sighs: 2005 BFA Thesis Show, Otis College of Art and Design. Los Angeles, CA

2004 
Letters To You, Curated by James Elaine, The Bolsky Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design. Los Angeles, CA
High and Low, Juried by Sandeep Mukherjee and Rebecca McGrew, The Bolsky Gallery. Los Angeles, CA


CURATORIAL
2010-2011
Director and Curator: CANAL, http://canal.tumblr.com/

2008-2009
Co-Director: Light&Wire Gallery, http://www.lightandwiregallery.com/ 
Some Indispensable Concepts for Understanding this Beautiful Exhibition,
Confederacy for Creative Ephemera, Circus Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2007
On Death & Drawing, Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
ADDITION: A Photography Exhibition, KAYO Gallery, Salt Lake City, UT

2005
Immodest Proposals, Co-curated with Jason Kunke, Buffalo Bayou Art Park, Houston, TX

RESIDENCIES AND AWARDS
The Otis Grant 2001-2005, 2011-2013
The Patricia Duff Memorial Scholarship, 2004
Friends of Joe Mugnaini Grant, 2005
SPCMKR Residency, Joshua Tree, CA, 2008
Otis Foundation Teaching Associate, 2011-2012

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Buckley, Annie, ArtForum Pick, February 14, 2008
Meyers, Holly, Pairing the Quiet and the Chaotic, L.A. Times, Febraury 28, 2008
Lee, Chris, Art Parties, Resculpted, the Los Angeles Times, Dec. 21, 2006, E26-29, (illus.)


WRITING
2010
Glendale News-Press, art reviews
Session_7_Words, with Krabbesholm Højskole, Four Boxes Gallery, Denmark
2009
Session_7_Words, Am Nuden Da, London, UK
2008
ForYourArt



TEACHING EXPERIENCE
Otis Evening College, 2004-2005
Youth Artist Workshop, Otis College 2006-2008
Sinai Akiba Academy, 2009
Wizard of Art, 2009-2010
Otis College Teaching Associate, 2011-2012
Otis College Teacher's Assistant, 2002-2005, 2011-2012

VISITING LECTURER
Otis College of Art and Design, 2008
MURDERTOWN, Chicago, IL, 2011

New York Arts Magazine

NOTED
Jessica Minckley is the curator of On Death and Drawing, on view at Angles Gallery in November,2007.
Image
Joseph Biel, Pavan, 2007. Courtesy of Angles Gallery 


A timeless and human quest: to understand our own mortality. We leave behind markers of time, then scrawl and shade and blur those marks. A specific task it is, to render the unknown, death: how we understand our idea of life, how we digest violence and loss. Meaning is rendered in simple materials: a devotional relic, a memorial. Art—the thing that differentiates us from all other living things—is intrinsically nostalgic; as soon as the work is finished it becomes a marker of our collective and personal pasts. In this particular moment, this kind of image making may not be cutting edge.
It may be that there is a small group of people who do not know each other, living in the same city, from many places, of varying ages, who are devoting their time to drawing in a classical fashion, creating highly sensitive and intensive works, which are sincere investigations of morbid curiosity and/or a personal investment in haunting, stark, or contemplative images. Perhaps the ephemeral and the sentimental have been marginalized for the moment. But this work seeks to recall an archaic language, when it was possible to consider an art form an "embodiment" of expressionistic evocation. These considerations manifest themselves in works of poetry that detail a never-ending waltz with death and drawing, presenting beautiful, highly rigorous practices which can be viewed, in a certain light, as mementos mori.

Ezrha Jean Black, Artillery Magazine

From an entry titled:

They tried to make me go to BCAM; I said "No, no, no."

...
It was an evening of such small, contemplative pleasures – which continued at the Carl Berg Gallery – right across the street from the splashy luau my editor and I were missing at LACMA. Jessica Minckley, who was featured in the L.A. Louver Rogue Wave of 2005, showed a small gallery of enigmatic objects and panels/pages(?), that (with the exception of a series of watercolors made with pages actually torn from books) initially seemed quite disparate, yet with an eerie sense of correspondence. Taken in succession, though, that sense of correspondence built into an assemblage of dark, quiet power. 

From the “Epigraph/Epitaph” series of watercolors – simultaneously dark and bitterly ironic yet almost elegiac – to the nascent Narcissus about to lose his shadow (a framed watercolor panel that actually has its full blown/full-grown cut-out counterpart in a fabric silhouette attached to the frame and dangling to the floor. Between these book-ends, among other things, a life/death mask, a stack of pink bakery boxes stacked almost to the ceiling, with only the top box opened, a pair or salt-lick cubes suspended from a set of plastic fingers (used for grazing cattle), a ‘salt drawing’ laid over a magazine ad for Morton Salt. 

I had the benefit of a rather cogent chat with the artist; but ultimately, the book pages with their ironic texts and ineffable watercolors (scatters, tangles and hatchings of variously brights and pastels) are by themselves enough to nail down Minckley’s thesis. Consider just one or two out of the 10 or so watercolors. “Without Reason” is a dark cloud of hatchings (this one actually in pencil); the epigram on the flyleaf is by Hannah Arendt (that alone promising a mordant note), “ … the great and incalculable grace of love, which says with Augustine, I want you to be, without being able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsurpassable affirmation.” The book: Amy Bloom’s Love Invents Us. Or, more simply/obviously(?), “Unanswered Prayers,” a spray of bright confetti on the flyleaf of – what else? – Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers. “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.” Is there anyone who doesn’t know that one by heart? (And is there anyone – atheists included – who doesn’t routinely set aside its wisdom?) 

Amid such resonance, the revelers across the street could only seem like bright shadows, the Chris Burden installation a long row of candles to light their way to the Tomb.

-Ezra Jean Black

Around the galleries, L.A. Times, Holly Myers

February 29, 2008

AROUND THE GALLERIES

Pairing the quiet and the chaotic


By Holly Myers, Special to The Times

Megan Williams received her bachelor of fine arts from CalArts in 1978, Jessica Minckley from Otis in 2005. Their parallel solo shows at the Carl Berg Gallery -- Williams' 17th, Minckley's first -- make for an illuminating glimpse across generations, each accomplished in its way but driven by fundamentally different concerns.

Williams was among the 16 artists included in MOCA's historic 1992 "Helter Skelter" exhibition, and her work continues to exude the irreverent vitality that defined that group. Her signature style is unmistakable: cartoonish forms -- mostly human figures and anthropomorphized buildings in this selection of pieces -- characterized by a rubbery agility, giddy pictorial buoyancy and an often furious sense of internally generated motion.

The predominant dynamic throughout the show is the tension between immobility and propulsion, claustrophobic containment and ecstatic release, reflected especially in the jaunty motif of the skyscraper. In a midsize painting called "Untitled (Building Escaping)," one such skyscraper wrenches free from the architectural tangle of its surroundings and flees on human legs. In another, titled simply "Rage," a similar building whirls into a cyclone of wrath, hurling a fist toward the viewer while spewing its contents -- pieces of furniture, rolls of toilet paper, alarm clocks -- in every direction.

Most of these paintings involve relatively centralized compositions whose pictorial activity looks to be held together by centripetal force. In the largest and most exhilarating work, however -- a wall-sized installation of five small canvases revolving around a figure who seems part-woman, part-tree and part-slingshot -- this force falls away and the forms seem to explode beyond the bounds of the central canvas, the imagery skimming from canvas to wall to canvas and beyond.

Minckley has a much lighter approach: Her exhibition is quiet, delicate and contemplative. Each piece feels considered and specific in nature, a sequence of discrete conceptual statements rather than a windstorm of broad thematic strokes.

But for her consistently delicate touch, Minckley has no signature style to speak of, nor any overriding affiliation with a particular medium. The show combines drawing and found object sculpture with an ease that's become typical among younger artists (thanks in part to the influence of two other "Helter Skelter" artists, Jim Shaw and Mike Kelley), though Minckley's drawing is particularly skillful.

The most enchanting works are the simplest: a series of pattern-oriented drawings made on the epigraph pages of books; a ceiling-high stack of pink cake boxes; a MormonAd (a poster distributed by the Mormon Church) coated with a thick crust of salt. Concise yet enigmatic, each has the air of a meditative exercise.

Notably absent is anything approximating Williams' fierce sense of propulsion -- which is to say, the spirit of rebellion that "Helter Skelter" so brilliantly encapsulated. But what, one might ask, is there for an artist of Minckley's generation to propel away from? The market is booming; L.A. has become a widely respected art capital; galleries are sweeping up artists right out of school; political tensions are high, but without the degree of mobilization that prevailed in the late 1970s; and no particular stylistic or ideological hegemony predominates.

A young artist today comes to distinction by different, perhaps subtler means. There is much to be gained from both approaches.

http://www.calendarlive.com/tv/radio/cl-et-galleries29feb29,0,3505553.story
http://www.calendarlive.com/tv/radio/cl-et-galleries29feb29,0,438260,print.story

artforum.com / CRITICS' PICKS, Annie Buckley


The French theorist Luce Irigaray reframes the nature of being as an expansive web, encompassing its own structure as much as everything held within its fluid, multiplying expanse. The first solo exhibition by Los Angeles–based artist Jessica Minckley seems attuned to this idea of an endless proliferation of meaning, rife with unseen connections linking sculptures and collages to memories, ideas, and emotions. She has created a spare and meticulous installation in which objects uncannily appear less fabricated than excavated, like footnotes from a dream or fragments from an imaginary archaeological dig. In one corner, a stack of pink pastry boxes is piled from floor to ceiling, while next to this, fingers extend from the wall—without benefit of a hand—entwined by a rope dangling two chunks of salmon-colored salt. Across the room, tiny blue hearts float across a torn page, and the black shadow of a figure cascades down the wall from the edge of a framed drawing. The veiled quality of Minckley’s symbolism contrasts cool distance with emotional punch; the irregularity of the distance between works adds to this queasy sense of orchestrated disjunction, like the pull of déjà vu. In the very next room, Megan Williams has installed an energetic exhibition of new paintings, rendering the title of Minckley’s show, “Solo Exhibition,” at once tongue-in-cheek and defiant, perhaps pointing to an ironic edge lurking within the quiet sophistication of her emerging visual vocabulary.

http://artforum.com/picks/section=la#picks19489
http://artforum.com/print.php?id=19489&pn=picks&action=print
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)