Jess Willa Wheaton: Second Nature

Hyacinth is pleased to present Second Nature, the debut NYC solo exhibition by Jess Willa Wheaton on view from March 1 through April 14, 2024.

In this show, Wheaton presents nine framed works across two walls, displaying her signature dynamic spaces bound to small surfaces. These invented scenarios include a pastoral postcard landscape from 1901 bleeding into recent catalog images of toxic spill mitigation products and fantastic cosmetic smears. A vacant shirt floats against arid rock, which refills its luminous bodily folds. The fertilizing figure of an earthworm emerges from a parcel of soil, roots, and blooms, to face an artificial mimic - a squiggle of digital goo printed for mass distribution and made real.

As a cornerstone of Wheaton’s practice, these works are always cut and glued together from original sources. At their heart is a search for new interpretations of space through pre-existing material. They may first appear as continuous wholes, yet a close second read reveals these surfaces to be highly orchestrated and running with subtle paper seams. At play in her labyrinthine and nonlinear process are multiple declining methods of image distribution - old and new print journalism, advertisements, book illustrations, cards, posters, and retail displays are all fair game.

By combining various sources and seeking to circulate color, space, matter, and light within one simultaneous “place,” each of Wheaton’s works functions as something between a painting and a photograph. Through her ever-expanding visual vocabulary, she is literally piecing together a splintered, felt brokenness, giving form to a social order built on instability and now facing ecological emergency. For much of human history, paper was integral to our communication, survival, and knowledge transmission. Now our constantly increasing enmeshment with screen-based optics overlays the experience of physical reality with a listless placelessness and atemporality. Wheaton is interested in reclaiming this loss of focus and sensitivity by constructing novel spaces that are slowly and tenderly born of found printed paper. She responds to this lack of sense of place and time online by arranging for the fallow edges of her deeply low materials to interact in ways that transcend their initial intent, reflecting this present moment.

Jess Willa Wheaton is a New York City-based artist that comes from painting and works in collage. She received her MFA from Hunter College in 2014, her BFA from the California College of the Arts in 2009, and a Certificate in Visual Arts from Camosun College in 2006. Her work has been included in numerous exhibitions at venues including Tappeto Volante, Underdonk, and Present Company in Brooklyn; Peninsula and 601 Artspace in New York; and The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and Deluge Contemporary Art in Victoria, BC, Canada. In 2018 Colpa Press produced a monograph of her recent work, featuring poetic responses by Natasha Marie Llorens.