Exhibit by Jessica Summers Opens Feb. 16 in Brooks Gallery
The Fairmont State University School of Fine Arts presents a solo art exhibition by Jessica Summers in February and March.
An exhibition opening and artist’s lecture is planned for 1 p.m. Monday, Feb. 16, in the JD Brooks Gallery, located on the fourth floor of Wallman Hall. The show runs through March 13. Admission is free and open to the public. For more information, call (304) 367-4219.
Jessica Anne Summers received her B.F.A. in Two-Dimensional Studies and Art Education from Bowling Green State University in 2004; in 2014, she graduated with her M.F.A. in Two-Dimensional Studies from Bowling Green State, where she is currently an adjunct professor teaching in Fine Arts. Summers’ work has been chosen for a number of national and international exhibitions, including “Drawing Connections” at the Siena Art Institute, Siena, Italy; the” Contemporary Realism Biennial” at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art in 2012, for which she was included in the exhibition catalog, “Who We Aren’t” at Union Street Gallery in Chicago Heights; and “Tapped” at Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, Ohio. This fall, Summers was invited by Ohio’s First Lady Karen Kasich to be the Fall Spotlight Artist at the Ohio Governor’s Residence, where she delivered an artist talk that was later televised. She is currently represented by two Ohio Galleries: Brandt-Roberts Gallery in Columbus and Bonfoey Gallery in Cleveland.
Summers believes that a home tells a story about its inhabitants, regardless of their presence.
“While personal spaces reflect our individual location, lifestyle and taste, domestic spaces universally read as intimate and familiar. It is with this reasoning that I honor the tradition of artists representing the contemporary domestic interior and choose to use my suburban home as the subject and setting for my work,” Summers says. “On a formal level, this allows me to provide context for my figurative works and make full use of traditional visual story telling devices, such as windows, doorways and mirrors. Conceptually, my home serves as the stage to explore modern relationships in which couples cohabitate but for numerous reasons rarely connect. In addition to using my private space as a stage, I use myself and my husband as characters acting in deeply personal yet ambiguous narratives that are deliberately more emotive than literal.”
Summers says she draws inspiration from actual spaces within her home.
“These direct pieces can exist on their own; they can also lead to more elaborate narrative works,” she says. “For these, I use drawing to stitch together photographs taken from multiple points of view to construct images that could have never been captured in a single glance. By manipulating the conventions of perspective, I craft spaces that are believable yet subjective and thus produce a visceral experience for the viewer. Rather than passively looking through Alberti’s window, the viewer either becomes an active participant, inhabiting the depicted space or plays the role of voyeur, aware of their unwelcome presence.”
ArtBrooks GalleryJessica SummersSchool of Fine Arts
