Interview with Jessica Serran

Dennis and I go to Avalon Bakery almost every Saturday.  One Saturday, I happened to glance inside one of the other buildings on the way there and was struck by these huge paintings.  I was standing outside of The Spiral Collective, which unbeknownst to me was home to the Dell Pryor Gallery.  Once inside I stood beneath very large canvases made of file folders.  Looking way upward, I felt like a child trying to grasp something I couldn’t completely understand.

"Flesh and Blood"

Jessica Serran’s art is like a visual display of one person’s stream-of-consciousness.  Each painting has human-like figures, their posture expressing a feeling, and sometimes with thoughts scrawled near them.  She was kind enough to grant us an interview and I’m really blown away by how intently she thinks about art.  I highly recommend visiting her website to view her paintings in more detail and to see videos of her performance art.  Better yet, go to Avalon, get a sea salt chocolate chip cookie and the best espresso you’ll ever taste and then pop in the Spiral Collective to see it in person.

Detail of "Can't I Just Surrender?"

The entire interview and more images are after the jump.

You went to the College for Creative Studies here in Detroit for your undergrad degree. What led you to choose art school for your college days?

To be honest, in many ways I feel like my choice had some “divine intervention” to it. I was good at art in high school, and was always making things, but hadn’t considered it as a possible career choice. I grew up in a small town and didn’t really know what sort of possibilities existed if I were to pursue art. I was strongly considering study math in college, which I also loved, until a friend encouraged me to consider art one fateful evening when she was over pouring through the collection of things that I had made for my family over the years. Something hit me, it felt right, and I applied to art school.

"Forgive Me Father"

Can you tell me more about the masters degree that you earned in Transformative Arts? What did you take away from that program?

Sure. The program was part of the Arts and Consciousness Department at John F. Kennedy University in Berkeley, CA. The program is incredibly unique because it overtly talks about art and spirituality in the same sentence and honours the fact that the creative process is inherently a healing process. Transformative Arts is geared towards artists taking what they do out into the world, to the general public or some specific demographic, and developing a process or a program that facilitates art as a healing modality for others. The program was utterly amazing for me. I’ve always been deeply interested in the creative process itself and how that process applies to any creative endeavour and to our lives in general. The program helped me to really explore my own process and to create art objects that are grounded in a deep exploration of that process. I also walked away with the understanding that I could take my own very unique and person-specific way of experiencing the world and turn that into some type of gift/service to others.

How did you start using file folders as your canvas? Do they have a meaning?

I had a job at the time doing home renovation and maintenance work for a woman in Berkeley. She was in the process of purging and sorting through boxes and boxes of old files. As the contents were emptied she was left with all of these file folders. Her habit was to always recycle or find someone who could re-use whatever item she was finished with. She asked me one day if I was interested in the file folders and intuitively I said yes. Eventually I started drawing on them and found that they were a really great surface to work on. I loved the way that graphite moved across them. Gradually I started taping them together to make bigger canvases. Conceptually they become a metaphor for the process of opening up and sorting through the parts of our lives that we might have “shoved in a file, never to be opened again.” Most of us file things away that we never actually revisit. My work is about examining these parts of our experience and bringing them into the light. So yes, the file folders do have meaning.

"Yin and Yang"

You’ve described your paintings as “as avenue for the formless to take on a form.” What formless things do your paintings capture?

In many ways my paintings are similar to dreams. They pull from the sub, or unconscious part of our experience and give images and narratives to that which lies beneath the surface of everyday consciousness. The “formless” that I speak of is our internal experience of the world — the collection of thoughts, feelings, archetypes and symbols that make up our subjective experiences of how it feels to be in the world. I give these things “form” through line and colour and shape in order to externalize them and have a more objective dialogue with this internal material. I often describe my work as a type of mapping, and the terrain that I map is internal.

Your paintings are fairly larger, sometimes even wrapping around corners of a room. Is there a reason that you work in this scale?

I love the experience of being completely surrounded by my images, and its become important for me to create environments in which others are immersed in the energy and imagery that I create. It is a very different experience to stand in front of an object hanging on a wall than it is to be standing within an object and allowing it to encompass you. When the object is on the wall, with space between you and it, it’s easier for the work to feel separate and distant from you. And I also think that we’ve become so conditioned to having rectilinear objects on walls around us that we can easily overlook them. It’s as though that very format can decrease their reception. So I make images that wrap around a room to help shift the relationship between object and audience.

"Porte"

Your art because it seems to depend so much on your thoughts and interactions with others, which is what makes it so personal and original. Do you have any external cultural influences (film, music, places, other artists?)

My work is certainly personal, and draws so much from my own experience, but that includes everything that I read or see or come into contact with. I am a big reader. Books and ideas transferred through the written word are very important to my process. I’ve always felt that my work is more connected to literature and spoken word and even music than it is to visual art. There is a “reading” that has to happen to fully digest my work. And music is such an encompassing experience that is often much more open to shameless expressions of how we feel than the contemporary art world is. So in many ways I feel a stronger kinship to music and literature than I do to visual art. Lately, my personal soundtrack includes the music of Bon Iver, Hot Chip, LCD Soundsystem, M.I.A, Valla•Turner•Williamson, Sterling Toles, Audra Kubat and Manu Chao. I’ve been reading The Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahamsa Yogananda, Carolyn Myss, Deepak Chopra and Ken Wilber. Visual-art-wise I love what Dan Nelson, Anna Campbell, Matthew Barney, Cate White and Wangechi Mutu are doing.

See more at jessicaserran.com.

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One Comment on “Interview with Jessica Serran”

• New Website and Prints from Jessica Serran — Perfect Laughter
  

  [...] right before our wedding, CCS alumni Jessica Serran completely redesigned her website. When we interviewed her a while back, we talked mostly about her paintings. But Jessica works with a lot of mediums, [...]

  10-20-09 » 1:01 PM »

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