Jessica Fenlon

Raised by wolves in the frozen tundra of the north, artist, and poet Jessica Fenlon lives in Chicago, Illinois. A multi-media artist, she works most visibly in experimental video, short film, and experimental performance work. BFA University of Wisconsin 1999. MFA SMFA Boston 2002. After completing her multi-media thesis exhibition at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, she moved to Pittsburgh, PA. There she developed her practice by showing work as a solo artist and in collaboration with choreographers, bands, and literary performances. In late 2010, she moved to Chicago, IL. Most recent exhibitions ~ Nov. 2012, the Irish Film Festival London. Sept. 2012, Television, curated by Sarah Lundy for MART, Cork, Ireland. Ms. Fenlon is a complex synaesthete. Her obsessions include: dictionaries, epistemology, visual language of iconography, mysticism, meditation practice, media criticism, art of resilience, scavenger culture, beautiful decay.

Artist Statement

I use computers to create art. I use a vocabulary of making unique to digital media. Animating particle systems, working with static, manipulating loops, managing glitches . . . why? These features of digital toolsets are underneath the surface of what we see on the computer every day.

I’m manipulating the elements of material that other folks use to . . . make recognizable illusions that we participate with every day. We do our banking, our socializing, our jobs using these recognizable illusions. They carry information about the world, without being that information. Yet people seem to forget that the information on the screen is not the world it represents.