Jennifer Celio

My delicately rendered drawings manipulate perception, creating fantastical iterations in which artificial and natural imagery fuse to become newly impossible scenes. Processing seemingly disparate parts into a surreal whole, I derive inspiration from the urban environment, environmental issues, political topics, and graphic design and font elements. Working in graphite pencil on paper, I create obsessively detailed works with cross hatching techniques, mining a trove of symbols and objects from my collection of images and integrating them into an amalgamated version of reality.

My recent body of work, titled “Not In My Back Yard,” references the “NIMBY” acronym that was coined within the environmental and conservation movement. These drawings explore the ugly elements of the urban environment, placing objects like food trucks, oil derricks, caged trees, graffiti, windmills, and out of place animals into imagined settings that seem plausible yet are dystopic. I use the juxtaposition between natural and man-made surroundings to illustrate the invasive tendencies of modern urbanization. Without blatantly depicting nature as being “under-siege” by modernity, the drawings instead capture the imbalance created when nature tries to...

B.F.A. in Drawing and Painting from California State University, Fullerton in 1996

SOLO AND TWO PERSON EXHIBITIONS
2017: Planes and Structures (two person exhibition with Helen Chung), 18th Street Arts Center, Santa
Monica, CA, October 2017.
Beyond the Horizon (two person exhibition with Martin Machado), The Italian American Museum
(Museo Italo Americano), San Francisco, CA, January 2017.
2016: Hitched to everything else, Haphazard Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, April 2016.
2014: Will there be an elephant?, Moorpark College Art Gallery, Moorpark, CA, November 2014.
2013: Not In My Backyard: Urban Drawings, California State University Dominguez Hills Art Gallery, Carson, CA, January 2013.
2012: Spotlight artist, Art San Diego-Contemporary Art Fair, Katherine Cone Gallery, September 2012.
2011: California Girls (2 person), Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts, New York, NY, June.
Ghetto Birds and Suburban Dreams, Long Beach Playhouse Gallery, Long Beach, CA, April 2011.
2010: I wanna be here in my city, curated by Habib Kheradyar, Phantom Galleries L.A., Long Beach, CA, June 2010.
2007: “Next Exit”, New Drawings, Cristinerose Gallery, New York, NY, November 2007.
The World Around Us, (2 person), koelsch gallery, Houston, TX, January 2007.
2006: Topographic, The Mike Napoliello Gallery, Hermosa Beac...