Jessica Voorsanger | |
---|---|
Born | 1965 (age 57–58) New York |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | Rhode Island School of Design, Goldsmiths College |
Known for | Painting, performance art, installations |
Movement | Contemporary Art |
Spouse | Patrick Brill, best known as Bob and Roberta Smith |
Website | digitalgrapevine |
Jessica Voorsanger (born 1965) is an American artist and academic, living and working in London. She has worked on the "Mystery Train" project for the Institute of Contemporary Arts to make contemporary art more accessible to people with learning disabilities. Her work has been exhibited more than two dozen times with her husband, fellow artist Patrick Brill, best known as Bob and Roberta Smith.
Jessica Voorsanger was born in New York City in 1965 and grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Two of her grandparents were artists: her father's mother and her mother's father. [1] [2]
She first studied fine art at The Brooklyn Museum Art School in New York from 1982 to 1983 and obtained her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Rhode Island School of Design in 1987. She began graduate studies at Goldsmiths College, London in 1991 and received her Master of Arts in fine art in 1993. [1] [2]
She met Patrick Brill (the artist Bob and Roberta Smith) after graduating from Rhode Island School of Design. When he returned to London, she went with him and they are now married. [2]
Voorsanger creates inter-active installations, objects, performances and events that reference pop and celebrity culture. [1] As a child growing up in the 1970s she was enamored with popular sitcom television shows like The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family , and, as one critic has reported, she believes her interest in the shows planted "the seeds of star adulation" that has influenced her work; and "that these cosy shows were a social glue, offering comfort to a nation traumatised by the Vietnam war and bankruptcy." [2] Her artwork explores stardom, television shows, and fame using a wide range of media, including filmed performances, paintings and sculptures. Journalist Jessica lacks said, "Her brand of celebrity-quick art has occasionally been dismissed as lightweight, with critics overlooking or ignoring the fact that Voorsanger's guileful ability to make work that is as addictive and kitsch as Heat magazine, operates on the same plain as the world she is critiquing." [2]
She particularly is interested in portraying celebrities that she believes have real talent, increasingly relevant with the advent of reality television. In 2008's Star Struck, performers were made up as Cher, Billy Idol, Michael Jackson, Devo, Kurt Cobain, George Harrison, Diana Ross, Morrissey, Paul Weller, David Hockney, Amy Winehouse and Siouxsie Sioux. The mixed media installation projected multiple films of the costumed karaoki performers singing the songs of another artist: David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust was sung by Amy Winehouse. The installation included portraits of the chosen celebrities. [3]
Voorsanger was commissioned to work on an Institute of Contemporary Arts six-month project entitled "Mystery Train." She partnered in 2008 with Art on the Underground and Pursuing Independent Paths (PIP) to make transportation easier to navigate and encourage people with learning disabilities to explore contemporary art venues. PIP students and Voorsanger visited London's museums and galleries, had a behind-the-scenes tour of the Charing Cross Underground station and developed multiple communications media, including "Heads, Bodies, Legs" posters and costumed karaoke games. Each poster has a composite image the head, body and legs of ICA staff, London Underground staff and PIP students. [4] [5] [6] Art educator, Emily Candela commented: "I have enjoyed the sense of exploration that runs through Mystery Train. Travel itself – and London's transport system in particular – served both as inspiration for our projects with Jessica Voorsanger as well as the link between our base at the ICA, PIP's centre in Westminster and the world of galleries and museums that we discovered." [5]
Voorsanger has lectured since 1997 for Goldsmiths College Masters of Arts program, Sunderland, Camberwell College of Arts, Royal College of Art, and The Slade. From 1998 to 2003, she was a lecturer in pictorial arts at Kent Institute of Art & Design. Since 2003 she has been a part-time lecturer for both the University for the Creative Arts's Fine Art and Research and Wimbledon School of Art's Bachelor of Arts programs. Voorsanger has been an external examiner for the University of East London since 2007. [1]
She has exhibited widely in the United Kingdom, United States and Germany. She and her husband, Patrick Brill, known as the artist Bob and Roberta Smith, exhibited together more than 2 dozen times. Some of her solo and group exhibitions are: [1]
James Lee Byars was an American conceptual artist and performance artist specializing in installations and sculptures, as well as a self-considered mystic. He was best known for his use of personal esoteric motifs, and his creative persona that has been described as 'half dandified trickster and half minimalist seer'.
Stephen Snoddy is a British artist and gallery director.
Patrick Brill, better known by his pseudonym Bob and Roberta Smith, is a British contemporary artist, writer, author, musician, art education advocate, and keynote speaker. He is known for his "slogan" art, is an associate professor at the School of Art, Architecture and Design at London Metropolitan University and has curated public art projects such as Art U Need. He was curator for the 2006 Peace Camp and created the 2013 Art Party to promote contemporary art and advocacy. His works have been exhibited and are in collections in Europe and the United States. Brill co-founded The Ken Ardley Playboys and hosts the Make Your Own Damn Music radio show.
Anna Barriball is a British artist based in South London.
Olivia Plender is an artist based in London and Stockholm. She is known for her installations, performances, videos, and comics.
Jutta Koether is a German artist, musician and critic based in New York City and Berlin since the early 1990s.
Oliver Guy-Watkins is a British film director, writer and artist.
Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard are British artists and filmmakers.
Roberta Smith is co-chief art critic of The New York Times and a lecturer on contemporary art. She is the first woman to hold that position.
Klara Lidén is a contemporary artist. She currently lives and works in Berlin and New York City. Lidén is known for her installations and videos that respond to specific architectural environments.
Dana Hoey is a visual artist working with photography, using "the camera to reveal the inner life of women, especially young women." Her photographs are often ambiguous and have multiple meanings. In 1999, in an exhibition entitled Phoenix she showed a series of seventeen black-and-white photo-prints and one forty-one-foot-long digital billboard image; writing in Frieze, Vince Aletti said, "the exhibition is a mystery that bristles with clues but is ultimately unsolved; perhaps it is unsolvable." In her introduction to the catalog for Hoey's 2012 exhibit, The Phantom Sex, at the University Art Museum, University at Albany, curator Corinna Ripps Schaming wrote, "Using both staged and directed photography, her meticulously constructed pictures speak to her deep knowledge of the art and its ability to conflate fact and fiction. Her seemingly spontaneous pictures are choreographed through simple directives and are subject to her ruthless editorial eye, which is always attuned to bringing social dynamics to the fore."
Robert Koenig is an English sculptor, who specialises in wood sculpture and is a prominent exponent of the art of woodcarving using the traditional tools of mallet and chisel. He is known for his carved and polychromed figurative wood sculptures, which he has been creating since the early 1980s. One of the earliest polychromed figures was shown in the 'Temple' exhibition at the Shaw Theatre, London in 1988.
Cab Gallery was an art project from 1999 to 2001 curated by London art dealer Paul Stolper of Paul Stolper Gallery and art collector and London taxi driver Jason Brown. The concept was for art to be exhibited on the outside and inside of a working London taxi rather than a traditional gallery space. As stated by Brown, "It was important to me that when working, the artwork was incidental to the journey of the passenger. I hoped they would notice but it was part of their environment and unexpected. It was also interesting to me to learn which artworks they reacted to. But it had to be a natural discovery."
Suki Chan is an artist and filmmaker whose work uses light, moving image and sound to explore our perception of reality. She is drawn to light as a physical phenomenon, and the role it plays in our constantly shifting daily experience of our environment, be it urban or rural. Her pieces vary from photography, film installation to mixed-media sculptures.
Emilia Telese is an Italian artist whose practice includes performance, visual, site-specific and video art, interactive and body-responsive technology, installation, literature and public art. She lives and works between Brighton, UK, Foggia, Italy, and Reykjavik, Iceland. Telese graduated in 1996 with a BA (Honours) in painting from the Fine Arts Academy, Florence, focusing on 14th-century techniques, Arte Povera and political performance. In 1997 she studied acid-based printmaking techniques at the University of Brighton, where she continues to lecture. In addition she lectures at other institutions in the UK and internationally, specialising in the relationship between art, economics and professional practice. Her work Life Begins at Land's End (2013) was part of Rebirth Day, a concept organised by Michelangelo Pistoletto. Pistoletto named her a Third Paradise Ambassador, which is a small group of people chosen by him to embody the spirit of his Third Paradise concept. Her videos, along with works by other artists, were shown at the Musee du Louvre in Paris. Her most recent exhibition was Modern Women (2015) at Airspace Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent, with artist Binita Walia.
Peckham Platform is a public art gallery in London that commissions and exhibits work by contemporary artists, usually in collaboration with local community groups.
Alex Frost is a British contemporary artist, exhibiting internationally.
Andrew Lord is an English artist based in New York, primarily known for ceramics and drawings. In a 2010 monograph on the occasion of his exhibition at the Milton Keynes Gallery, Dawn Adès commented that his sculpture, informed by painting, ceramics, poetry, the natural world and the city, exemplifies, "The centrality of material things to memory, experience, associations."
Wendy Ann Taylor is an English artist and sculptor, specialising in permanent, site-specific commissions. According to her website, she 'was one of the first artists of her generation to “take art out of the galleries and onto the streets”'. Her work typically consists of large sculptures which are displayed to appear carefully balanced.
Serena Korda is a British visual artist. She has made work across a number of disciplines including performance, sculpture, ceramics and public art. Her work is interactive and encourages people to explore everyday rituals found from histories and conversations with one another. She encourages her audience to interact and be involved in creating these shared experiences that would usually be passed by.
{{citation}}
: CS1 maint: location (link) CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)