Jessie Edelman: Getaway

About

We live in an age of ubiquitous image construction, provoking our desires and creating a bounty of perception-altering realities. For Jessie Edelman, painting has always been her desired place and her means to be there. For the body of work exhibited in Getaway, Edelman explores this notion by imagining places she wants to go, turning her studio into her own painted world, building on found images and recollections. Heightened colors and rich textures create a daydream quality, inviting the viewer to linger in contemplation hovering between the abstract, the rendered, and the real.

Jessie Edelman paints lush, idyllic spaces that evoke desire, dreams, and memory. These paintings situate the viewer as a voyeur into her imagined getaways. Edelman frames these scenes within the painting with exuberant abstract and patterned borders. The artist intends to enchant the viewer with fantasy paintings of seaside vistas, candlelit rooms, and fresh fruit, somehow suspended in both luxurious interior and spectacular outdoor spaces. She also builds on the psychologically complex associations the viewer brings with them, as perspective shifts and figure-ground relationships oscillate. She cultivates a sensation  of being in two places at once — the world of the painting and that  of one’s own mind and memories.