Jessica Langley

Lives and works in Colorado Springs, CO

Artist statement

My work dances around the ecstatic, as something that walks a fine line between joy and madness. It is riddled with looming darkness and the anxiety of death; therefore, I have a preoccupation with visions of the unknown and the great beyond. How this is represented in popular culture is endless fodder, as it shapes our own imaginations of these concepts which defy depiction. My imagery fluctuates between land and sky, utilizing familiar, iconic, and sometimes spiritual representations of landscape alongside flattened shapes, negative space, or layers which further distort the illusion of space within the picture plane. Abstract devices run throughout, appearing as a black blob, a gestural mark, or an enveloping slime, obfuscating the image. I employ various methods of brushwork which simultaneously obscures, erases, and reveals the hand in contrast to the digital image. Looking at the experience of nature and landscape as inspiration, ritual, and subject of desire I place familiar, iconic, and spiritual representations of nature within a spartan and liminal space. I am interested in the tension between the seemingly infinite quality experienced through the (web) portal, the never-ending space, the “wild west” attitude portrayed on the internet and the flatness which occurs when framed. I call attention to the surface (or the matrix) which is acted upon. Recent works appropriate satellite images to display omniscient points of view, namely the Indian Ocean, Georgia...

Artwork