Office Gallery
November 8, 2024 - January 4, 2025
DIANE CHRISTIANSEN & JESSIE MOTT
Love to Love You Baby
Love to Love You Baby is part of an ongoing collaborative series by Diane Christiansen and Jessie Mott. Working side by side, the artists access each other's studio remnants to create new pieces that combine the spirt of playfulness alongside the tension of letting go.
Diane Christiansen’s practice has three interactive branches, each feeding and informing the others. She paints and draws daily and records images for animations. The resulting stop-motion footage, generated in drawings or paintings on plaster, with its erasures and revisions revealed in the completed digital medium, is a meditative ritual through which she acknowledges life’s essential impermanence and its durable illusion of solidity. In the artist’s worldview, all phenomena are alive. The seemingly static or abstract is in relationship with what is perceived as sentient. Prehistoric cave paintings, Betty Boop cartoons, and cracks in the sidewalk all prove that magic is everywhere. She intends not to waste a minute of this precious life.
Jessie Mott's work explores themes of queerness, eroticism, power, and vulnerability. Solitary hybrid creatures float in a blank white background, portraitlike. Their bodies transcend binary gender categories as well as the human–animal divide. Like an abject fairy tale, the work combines playfulness, innocence, and the suggestion of raw desire and/or shame; multiple worlds exist at once. Colorful geometric patterning, the use of twinning/doubling, and symbolism rooted in ancient cultures coexist with the creatures’ often seductive yet unnerving gaze. The paintings invite the viewer to project their own fantasies or narrative onto the image.
Diane Christiansen’s practice has three interactive branches, each feeding and informing the others. She paints and draws daily and records images for animations. The resulting stop-motion footage, generated in drawings or paintings on plaster, with its erasures and revisions revealed in the completed digital medium, is a meditative ritual through which she acknowledges life’s essential impermanence and its durable illusion of solidity. In the artist’s worldview, all phenomena are alive. The seemingly static or abstract is in relationship with what is perceived as sentient. Prehistoric cave paintings, Betty Boop cartoons, and cracks in the sidewalk all prove that magic is everywhere. She intends not to waste a minute of this precious life.
Jessie Mott's work explores themes of queerness, eroticism, power, and vulnerability. Solitary hybrid creatures float in a blank white background, portraitlike. Their bodies transcend binary gender categories as well as the human–animal divide. Like an abject fairy tale, the work combines playfulness, innocence, and the suggestion of raw desire and/or shame; multiple worlds exist at once. Colorful geometric patterning, the use of twinning/doubling, and symbolism rooted in ancient cultures coexist with the creatures’ often seductive yet unnerving gaze. The paintings invite the viewer to project their own fantasies or narrative onto the image.
