JESSICA NISSEN

I found a transparent spider- and was terrified but kept looking. I thought I could see its little organs working. When I was a 13 year old in my one and only camp experience I was struck by lightening after a swim in the lake. Fortunately, the electricity traveled though a pipe I was holding as I was washing sand off my feet.

Everyone’s memories no matter how vivid or murky become compressed and are filtered through understanding and new experience. There is a continuous effort to reconcile what we are and what we are becoming: to find connections and to feel connected. Rare spurts of lucidity may, if we’re lucky, reveal relationships between all that is variant, salty, elegant, chaotic, terrifying, breathtaking, and fragile; moments of collision. These impressions and my endeavor to find these collisions contribute to numerous bodies of work.

This site includes images from several painting, drawing and installation/sculpture series. My explorations have been divergent in terms of media but consistent in terms of focus. Being creative is an extension of inquiry about the world, a translation of what we perceive and through that a greater and deeper understanding. The more we become aware, the more the questions change, driving us to make these visions tangible.

Within each of these projects lie the issues that have always occupied my work: mind, perception, and the challenge to discuss the ineffable in the human experience.

"Convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magic-circumstantial, or it will not be."
- Andre Breton, Mad Love