Jessica Wilson

Lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands and New York, NY

Artist statement

I make computer-generated animations and installations with sensitivity to the somatic and material effects of phantasmal or virtual systems. My practice centers on questions of legibility: how abstract data becomes perceptible through light, color, and spatial cues, and how affect is registered through motion, texture, and surface. Most recently, I’ve been working with commercial display formats such as LED and banner taxi tops. My animations often engage atmospheric materials like fog, dirty glass, or reflected emergency lights to trace the edge where perception and emotion take form. I’m interested in animation as a process where unseen forces become visible: a flicker, a twitch, a delayed smile. This is present in Fountain (Weeping Socket), where I reanimated a European power outlet to weep from its holes. These subtle disruptions draw attention to what resists capture. I return often to moments of unreadability, where meaning surfaces not through clarity but through contamination, interference, and the lingering imprint of something half-felt. My animations don’t aim to illustrate; they hold a tension between technical exposure and visual enchantment, between internal dynamics and the surfaces that betray them. I think of contamination as a form of animation, where intangible properties begin to take physical shape. A yawn is contagious. That kind of transmission, where something invisible creates a visible response, is what drives much of my work. I currently live in...

Artwork