Jessica Robey - 'The Garden of Earthly Delights'

Join us for the opening reception on Saturday, October 15th from 12-2PM. Meet the artist and enjoy some refreshments!

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jessica Robey is a photographer, writer, art historian, and multi-media artist working and teaching in central Massachusetts. Her work focuses on the intersection of art, science, history and nature. She earned a BFA in photography at the San Francisco Academy of Art in 1989, a Ph.D in art history at the University of California at Santa Barbara in 2006, and is currently completing a M.Ed in Art at Fitchburg State University. She has been teaching art history full time at FSU since 2007, after teaching at the Brooks Institute of Photography in California for several years. Upon moving to Massachusetts, Robey returned to her studio practice after a long hiatus, experimenting with jewelry making, metalwork, bookmaking and assemblage. In recent years, she has begun to incorporate photography, painting, and video into her practice. Her work has been exhibited at the Fitchburg Art Museum and the Hammond Gallery at Fitchburg State University, and has been included in the Art on the Marquee video installation series at the Boston Convention Center. She will begin a two-year artist's residency with the North County Land Trust in 2023. 

STATEMENT OF PRACTICE

"My purpose for making art is to create a dialogue about our moment in history and the thinking that has brought us here. I seek to embrace the confusion of our times, opening myself and the viewer up to the beauty, cruelty, and strangeness of the world we live in. I am fascinated by the endlessly surprising, painful but wondrous collision of the way we want or expect things to be, with the way things actually are. I grapple with my unrequited desires and the unforgiving facts, and bring this struggle into my studio process. My process becomes a meditative act of reconciling the irreconcilable, of directly confronting the pain and wonder of living a conscious life. I begin with images, objects, and events that haunt me, and combine them to explore the mix of love and horror I feel when facing the world. For me, the struggle between the world-as-it-is and the world-we-long-for is best expressed by the friction created by using mixed media collage and found-object assemblage. I am particularly inspired by the ambiguity of the photograph as both an image and an object. I choose elements that point to reality in different ways, but bring them together to create a metareality that questions how we stich unsettling experiences together into a narrative we can understand and accept."