JOSHUA Drawing

Jessie grew up in the Midwest, splitting time between Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan before heading south to spend high school in Texas and Louisiana. Heavily influenced by the vividness of early 90s and 00s cartoons and video games, along with an acute familiarity of being a new kid throughout her upbringing, her colored pencil drawings explore an ever-evolving and inclusive depiction of ‘self’. By embellishing figurative outlines with dreamlike landscapes, objects, and elements, her figures act as an invitation to look beyond the circumstances of our everyday lives and engage with details of human complexity which observation alone fails to fully capture. At once unknowable and familiar, the people in her drawings live in between memory, reality, and imagination. Jessie’s career path has been untraditional, shifting between visual art and performing arts since she was very young. Having received a BFA in Theater, she moved to New York City, where she freelanced as a Scenic Artist for six years, painting sets and backdrops for Broadway, Off-Broadway, TV, and film. Jessie now lives in Los Angeles, California, bringing her experience in storytelling to visual art, illustration, and design full-time. Her first group exhibition took place at Rockefeller Center and she has since collaborated with galleries, art fairs, and publications across the United States and Canada along with art directors and editors at Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group, Booooooom, HBO (Euphoria, Sex Lives of College Girls), Netflix (Adam Sandler’s You Are SO Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah), Hulu (Better Things), and Madison Wells Media (hand-painted mural design and installation). Jessie is currently working as an artist ambassador for the NYCLU.