Jessie Evans

Jessie Evans is an artist whose practice is centred within painting and drawing, with an inclination toward performance and installation. Her work examines the relational lexicon formed by the art object, the artist, and the viewer, and attempts to linger in the space between these finite agencies. 

Evans paintings move with a light touch between abstraction and representation, a world where paint functions both as the symbolizer and symbolised. She is interested in the tension between painting as illusion and the social, practical roles of paint: to cover up, to demarcate, to vandalise. Within her work, abstraction often poses as both an indicator of the properties of paint and an expression of the artist's hand. Authorship and artistic flair are often exaggerated for humour, the canvas becoming a surrogate self; emotive, needy and attention-seeking. 

Evans’ image-making often exploits the emotional capacities of objects, such as paint brushes, tube carriages, debit cards, and dresses, with subjects tending toward the anthropomorphic. These fantasies of object vitalism play to a fetishistic drive, which conflates statements of social identity with modes of consumer culture. Her subjects are made to perform, inhabiting social roles and enacting their own relations, often embodying an emotive or manipulative presence.

Running through her work is a critical engagement with image as subject matter, in favour of a more diffuse logic of painterly reasoning. Her work often functions within series’, creating logic through their interdependency. In this way, they could be seen as non-deducible and in contention with the authority of the image. Installation becomes a key strategy here, facilitating multiplicity and emphasising the relationships between image and objecthood.