NYAB Event - Jessica Mein Exhibition

Jessica Mein Exhibition

Simon Preston Gallery

This event has ended.

Simon Preston Gallery presents Jessica Mein’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. Known for an expansive body of work including animation, video, collage and drawing, the artist continues a physical investigation of salvaged paper billboards from her hometown of São Paulo.

The exhibition comprises of a series of wall-based works and two large-scale floor-based wooden constructions. Mein derives many of the collages from obsolete billboard material, methodically choosing areas containing mechanical printing errors, and at times folding or further cropping to reveal minute detail, before transferring the dismantled image onto canvas or hemp. In addition to employing physical processes of scanning, cutting, ripping and masking, Mein delicately and painstakingly unthreads the fabric structure of the surface to reveal the wooden architectural support, reducing the final work to a composition of abstract, geometric forms.

Each individual work is titled obra, translated from Portuguese as alternatively ‘site of construction’ or ‘work of art’, and takes the very support and surface of the image as its foundational component. The process of transforming printed, mass-produced, graphic advertising images engages tensions between modernist aspirations of mechanization and the variety of glitches and errors inherent in the mechanical, the digital, and the handmade. This dislocation raises questions of value and hierarchy of production and economy of visual language.

Jessica Mein was born in 1975 in São Paulo, Brazil. She received her MFA from Hunter College, New York. Solo exhibitions include Simon Preston, New York, Galeria Leme, São Paulo, The Pavilion Downtown, Dubai. She has also exhibited as part of The Street Files - Biennial El Museo del Barrio, New York; The Julia Stoschek Foundation, Dusseldorf; Wellin Museum, Hamilton College, New York; Museo Tamayo de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico; Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai; The Drawing Center, New York; New York University Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, among others. Her work is included in collections at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Julia Stoschek Collection, Dusseldorf, and The Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo.