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JESSICA ZAWADOWICZ


Crossover
In the middle
There’s a box they don’t tell you about
FIGURE GROUND ROCKS
a little, left over    
Selected Work

CV                                                                                                                    
BIO 

 
           

I am an artist living and working in Chicago, IL.
My practice is grounded within painting, collage, improvisation, and sport playing. 
I recieved an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a BFA from The University of the Arts, and have attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture.
Past exhibitions includes Addendum Gallery (Milwaukee, WI), Regards Gallery  (Chicago, IL), Trinity Chrisitan College’s Seerveld Gallery (Palos Heights, IL), Patient Info (Chicago, IL), Free Range (Chicago, IL), Weatherproof (Chicago, IL), Ortega y Gasset Projects (Brooklyn, NY), PII Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), amongst others.
I lecture in the Painting & Drawing department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and work with brilliant high school students. 


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I make paintings with embedded-objects and attached-objects. I search for relationships between unseen but felt forces; like weight, time, cycles, gravity, and change, and am interested how these relationships can be revealed through purposefully arranging the 2-D with the 3-D. The objects that I include are ones collected from my day-to-day life and are local; stones, branches, rainwater, yesterday’s lunch, a favorite shirt, spit, snacks forgotten in my pockets, or my roommate’s spoon. I try to pick up on the intelligence in the things that surround me in their own time. I want to create places where seemingly disparate marks, objects, and touches reveal their interconnectedness with one another. I want to make direct contact with my reality, despite it never truly staying still. I understand the figure-ground relationship in painting as a kind of court: a physical, dimensional space for interruptions, silence, punctures, meet-ups, break-ups, touches of all kinds and I look toward the physical ground just as much as I do the painted ground.

In the studio, paintings get worked on, completed, and worked on again. Scrapes and scratches are left embedded into the substrate, and objects that once were adhered to the painting’s surface, get removed and pulled off, often leaving a literal index of their trace. A painting is complete when these disparate fragments come together to create an organization and interconnected logic that extends beyond any singular component. I care about witnessing a logic and an organization, not necessarily about making a linear sense.

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I just returned from walking around my block. I try to do this every morning. I live on a quiet street and it’s fairly predictable. I have noticed that the more that I do the same thing, like walking around my block, the more I can actually see it. My body, the pace of my breath, the sky, the trash, my roommate’s bike locked to the fence, time of day, those black cats, the neighbors and their rhythms, our interactions, our lack of intentions, our crossovers. I am interested in these immediate kinds of relationships and in witnessing their constant fluctuations.