Artist Feature: Jessica Langley

Jessica Langley (b. 1981, USA) is a multimedia artist currently based in Colorado. She has exhibited her work internationally, and has been an artist-in-residence in numerous programs including Skaftfell Center of Visual Art in Iceland, Askeaton Contemporary Art in Ireland, the SPACES World Artist Program in Cleveland, and the Digital Painting Atelier at OCAD-U in Toronto. She was a recipient of the J. William Fulbright Scholarship for research in Iceland, and earned her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2008. She is an amateur mycologist, and her artwork and writings have been published in the New York Mycological Society Newsletter, New American Paintings, NPR, Hyperallergic, and Temporary Art Review. She is co-founder of The Yard, a site for public art in Colorado Springs.

Jessica Langley consistently observes and denies the proposition within her work. The images are borrowed, cut up, disjointed, and abstracted. Throughout her work a thread remains - how cultural symbols of landscape are experienced both directly and through the post-digital image. Through her interest in Mycology, she investigates sustainable practices.

Langley uses painting, digital print, and collage to translate an image-based event into a practice that exists between the analogous dichotomies of abstraction and representation and the objective/subjective perspectives. Her techniques simultaneously obscure and reveal the hand in contrast to the digital image.

Much of her work has a digital component, though she continually finds ways to break away from the screen and back to the physicality of materials and the sensory experience of process. In doing so, she creates tension between the seemingly infinite quality experienced through the (web) portal and the tangibility of lived experience.

GOCA: Have you participated in previous faculty exhibitions at UCCS, if so, how many?

Jessica Langley: No, this is the first one.

GOCA: Why do you think it is important to hold a faculty exhibition?

JL: I think it is good to exhibit work in your community, so that students, faculty and community members at large can know your work.This helps to encourage understanding and sharing of ideas

GOCA: What type of impact to you believe it has on campus?

JL: I think it is good for students to see artwork of their faculty and working/teaching artists rather than only see artwork in a commercial context. This will help to broaden their ideas of what art can be.

GOCA: The theme for this exhibition is time, how do you see this theme connecting to your work?

JL: My work requires time, not just in process, but in growth. I am literally growing my materials, using mushroom mycelium and foraged mushrooms.

GOCA: As an artist, what advice have you received that has proved to have a large impact on you or your work?

JL: Don’t run away from boredom, embrace it as a time to let your mind wander—that is where creativity happens!

See the work Jessica Langley and her fellow UCCS VAPA Faculty at TIME at GOCA Ent Center for the Arts (5225 N Nevada Ave) starting January 31st and running through May 12th.

Jessica Langley will give a free artist talk on April 5th along with exhibition artists Carol Dass, Stacy Platt, and Ben Kinsley. Register HERE.