Jess Willa Wheaton

Jess Willa Wheaton is concerned with combining disparate found images in radically unified ways, through a slow and complex process of physical observation and adjustment - in deep contrast to our widely shared experience of viewing images in rapid succession on screens. Wheaton’s coalescent but illogical compositions revive the visual life of discarded print materials, and are mostly sourced from declining methods of image distribution — old and new print journalism and advertising, antique book illustrations and photographs, and commercial posters or retail displays. All materials are found original printed paper, cut and glued together by hand. Upon resolution, each new, amalgamated image insists upon a narrative history of those printed objects that is never fully revealed - a process of de-contextualization that produces an equally mysterious outcome. An anarchic symbolic logic prevails across her work, producing sensory reactions that are often completely detached from the component images’ original intentions and authority.

Jess Willa Wheaton (b. 1984, Sebastopol, CA) received her MFA from Hunter College in 2014, her BFA from the California College of the Arts in 2009, and a Certificate in Visual Arts from Camosun College in 2006. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at venues including The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and Deluge Contemporary Art, in Victoria, Canada; Underdonk and Present Company, in Brooklyn; and 601 Artspace and Shoot The Lobster, in New York. Selected residencies and grants include the Sanskriti Foundation Residency, New Delhi, India, in 2019; the Camosun College Artist in Residence in Victoria, Canada, in 2014; and the Kossak MFA Travel Grant for independent travel to Paris, France, in 2013.