BIO

Jess is a textile artist based in northern California. Hailing from northern New Mexico, she earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and currently lives and works in San Francisco as an artist and an art director. For the past 10 years, she has worked primarily with silk, in an installation-based medium.

Jess is interested in how man-made materials and artifacts accumulate in our environment, and the new forms they assume over time. She explores the idea of objects either growing by themselves or being manipulated into something new and obscure. By using silk as her primary medium, the landscapes she creates take on an ephemeral quality and it becomes hard to decipher if these landscapes are relics of the past or a glimpse into what our natural world will look like in the future.

Jess has exhibited her work nationally, and in Wales, UK. Her work was recently exhibited at Ramon’s Tailor Gallery in San Francisco. She has exhibited in northern New Mexico and was a selected artist for Art Chicago. In 2020, she was the first Artist in Residence at the United World College of the American West in Montezuma, New Mexico. Jess joined the San Francisco Artist Studios in the Dogpatch in San Francisco, in June 2021.

art.jesslanham.com
@jesslan4

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STATEMENT

I'm interested in how materials and artifacts collect and accumulate debris, and the new forms they assume over time. I explore the idea of objects either growing by themselves, or being manipulated into something new and obscure. As these objects disintegrate and evolve, their moment in time becomes ambiguous, and their interaction with the landscape and atmosphere can blur the subtle distinctions between the old world and a potential new world. I bring these ancient and new forms together in my work by combining traditional printmaking and textile techniques.