Join us for West Seattle Art Walk!
Thursday, October 14th
Thursday, November 11th
Thursday, December 9th
This quarter, Viscon Cellars is hosting returning artist Jessie Summa Russo from October through December. Jessie studied art and illustration at Sarah Lawrence in New York and Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and has called West Seattle home for the past two decades.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My recent work is inspired by my life as a musician as well as the lives of my relatives. My grandfather was an Abstract Expressionist painter in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, and I feel like his paintings both defined him and I understood him through them. My mother went to art school when I was a toddler; some of my earliest memories are of the printmaking studio with giant black press wheels taller than people.
When making art, I don’t think about anything, and that is the primary joy of the process. It feels like a pure meditation on visual interest and the nature of time (there was nothing, and now there is art), and a simultaneous, unfettered expression of that meditation.
I use coffee filters, candy wrappers, vintage record sleeves, yellowed sheet music, and fragments from my Grandma’s scrapbooks. (She kept everything.) I cover and reveal elements with paint until the effect reminds me of a wall plastered with posters and graffiti that have worn away over time. I like to bring a hint of goofiness to a beautiful, textured aesthetic, and campy ‘50s ephemera is perfect for that.
I’m drawn to art with texture for its mystery—how can it be beautiful as it reminds us of entropy and death? How will I view this work as I change with time? For example, I’ve begun using my 25-year-old etchings in collages, and by ‘using’ I mean ripping out bits and gluing them into new worlds, sometimes even painting over them completely—transforming the fraught past into a hopeful future with new meaning.
I want to deliver room transformation to friends and strangers that they enjoy as much as I enjoy my own collection. I want them to look at the work and see something new every time.
COMMISSIONS: Email Jessie directly.
INSTAGRAM @summarusso
Stop by the tasting room on 10/14 from 5PM until 9PM to have a look and enjoy complimentary snacks with some Viscon Cellars wines.
