Jessie Shinn’s work addresses the mystery, confusion, and enchantment of everyday human life – wonder and ambiguity, intimacy and strangeness, imagination and fear, the slipperiness of time and space, light and dark. She looks for moments that combine surprise and recognition in a flash of light, shadow, reflection, color, line, or shape within the overlooked, ephemeral and ordinary. She is interested in visual confusion, tricks of light and mirage, and the aura that can surround everyday objects, places, and spaces. She is seeking the charge of things - hidden and revealed, real and imagined.
Over the last several years she has come back to drawing as her primary practice. She likes working slowly - allowing the parts of the image, the shapes and marks, to become both deeply familiar and deeply strange as she spends extended time with them.
Sometimes even when she has words, they are inadequate, or seem inaccessible. Yet experiences that can’t be described can still have resonance, affect. They may touch, move, or infect; they may manifest a feeling, disposition or tendency. She makes images to access that space where her knowledge and language fail.
Jessie Shinn lives in Asheville, North Carolina. She works in a variety of media, including photography, painting, and ceramics, with her most recent work a return to the basis of her practice in drawing. Shinn earned her BFA from the University of Arizona and her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. She also holds a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. Shinn has exhibited her work nationally, including at the S. Tucker Cooke Gallery in Asheville, LaGrange Art Museum, Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art, the Tucson Museum of Art, the University of Arizona Museum of Art, Kemper Art Museum, Untitled Gallery, and Manifest Creative Research Gallery and Drawing Center. She taught Drawing, Basic Design, Art and Visual Culture, and Writing Foundations for Pima Community College, and Art History for Klamath Community College; and was a founding member of Untitled Gallery, a non-profit artist-run gallery in Tucson, Arizona.