NYAB Event - Jesse Harrod “Low Ropes Course”

Jesse Harrod “Low Ropes Course”

NURTUREart

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NURTUREart presents Jesse Harrod: Low Ropes Course.

Jesse Harrod’s artistic practice is guided by a fundamental commitment to exploring the dense political entanglements of material history, queer-feminist survival, and craft practice. Across her work, Harrod underscores how associations between craft practice and feminized labor have led to the marginalization of craft within contemporary art. The use of brash, vernacular and lowbrow materials points to the convergences and divergences between “disposable” materials and people alike, signaling how, when transformed, such materials can take on personalities that assert queer and anti-normative ways of being, knowing, and relating.

The centerpiece of Harrod’s solo show at NURTUREart (a selection from our 2015 open calls) is her large-scale installation, The Ranger Series, consisting of individual welded and powder-coated frames with netted parachute cord (aka paracord) assembled together into a large-scale modular installation to create a wall of leaning “bodies.” The shapes created by and within the knotted paracord recall genital orifices, strap-on harnesses, cock rings and other fetish ornamentals and prosthetics associated with queer sexuality. Suspended between the organic and the artificial, these draw on recognizable morphologies to explore ideas of sexual growth, pollination and the perversity of natural forms.

Jesse Harrod has an MFA from the department of Fiber and Material Studies from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University. She is currently the Head of Fibers and Material Studies at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia.

Harrod has exhibited at the American University Museum in Washington, DC, La Esquina in Kansas City, MO, and the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in NYC. Her work is included in forthcoming exhibitions at the Kohler Art Center in Sheboygan, WI, the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD, and the Boston Center for the Arts. She has been awarded residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Ox-bow, and RAIR Philly. Her work has appeared in The Journal of Modern Craft, Artslant, and Hyperallergic. Recently, she joined Philadelphia-based arts organization Vox Populi where she works on education and fundraising.