Congrats to Jessica Eastburn, the winner of our 2017 Inner Room Call for Entries. Eastburn’s installation, Factotum, on view in special installation in the GearBox Gallery Inner Room from September 28 – October 21st. The exhibition includes Eastburn’s paintings as well as sculptural objects & cut-outs.These works address technology and the deluge of information that we are presented with on a daily basis through email, website, and social media.
September 28 – October 22, 2017
Jessica Eastburn currently lives and works in Oakland, CA She received her BA in Liberal Studies from Portland State University and her MFA in Pictorial Art from San Jose State University. She was born in the United States in the early 1980’s, and as such, she witnessed the consumerist excess of the end of the 20th century as well as the evolution of the rapidly advancing digital technology that has come to dominate and define contemporary life. These factors provide the locus points which Eastburn’s work both responds to and expands upon conceptually and technically.
The advent of digital technology has inundated people with information, most of it unimportant, trivial, or outright useless. Eastburn’s work mimics this contemporary digital overload by illustrating liminal, arbitrary, and incongruous information, which takes the form of swatches and snippets of patterns and motifs, and layers of pop culture iconography that all overlap and overshadow one another to create a pastiche of ephemeral media flotsam. The information presented in the works is often disparate and random, allowing the viewer to come up with their own narrative for the work. The point of the work is that there is no “right reading” of it, but instead, it’s a jumble of information that the viewer must make sense of or disregard.
The process of creating the work is the antithesis of “drag and drop” digital technology, since everything is drawn and painted entirely by hand using analog technology such as the ruler and compass to sketch out the works, and gouache (an opaque watercolor), eel-vinyl (for inking cartoons), airbrush and spray paint.
Jessica’s work has been exhibited throughout the Bay Area as well as nationally. She participated in the FISART street art festival in Timisoara, Romania in 2014. She is the recipient of a Creative Activity Grant from Portland State University and the Young Artist Fellowship at Gallery Route One in Point Reyes Station, CA.