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Jessica Campell recently wrote, “I absolutely hate that Picasso characterized women as suffering machines. I also often feel like one.” This statement offers profound context for Campbell’s recent forays into portraiture of women within her creative practice, which spans from comics to fibers, painting, and drawing. Part of an ongoing homage to women past and present, Campbell’s series of portraits mix and match features, manifesting subjects that are as idiosyncratic and they are expressive.
Anadolia is a varied edition screenprint, with 25 unique combinations of recurring facial features and characteristics.
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This series began from a collage, with the artist working in cut paper painted in flat colors to create an abstract background of bold, simple shapes. With this collage as the starting point for each print, the artist then rendered additional layers using ink, quill pens, brushes, and frosted mylar. The drawn layers register loosely over the initial collage to create a sense of movement and energy.
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The title Anadolia is a portmanteau of the words "anagram" and "pareidolia.”
Picasso claimed to capture all aspects of a sitter by showing both the front and sides of a face at once. But today, Cubist distortions can feel grotesque or diminutive, revealing a tension between artist and subject. With Campbell’s women, the psychology is different. The artist has taken semiotic cues from the past, but moved beyond its influence–instead evoking in her portraits self-expression, empathy, and radical acceptance. -
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Artists
Jessica Campbell
Jessica Campbell is a multidisciplinary artist and author working in comics, fibers, painting, drawing, and performance. Drawing on a wide range of influences, including science fiction, art world politics, and her evangelical upbringing, Campbell explores ways to reflect heterogeneity through a combination of disparate media, subjects, and tone. Whether through cartoony depictions or the use of unorthodox material, her work often wields humor as a device to help one come to terms with its darker subject matter.
Campbell is the author of three graphic novels, including RAVE (Drawn and Quarterly, 2022), Hot or Not: 20th Century Male Artists (Koyama Press, 2016) and XTC69 (Koyama Press, 2018). Her comics have been publsihed by MoMA, The New Yorker, Hyperallergic and the Nib, among other publications. Her Chicago Works show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2018–2019) was reviewed in Art in America, Hyperallergic, and Juxtapoz.
Jessica Campbell: Anadolia, 2024
Current viewing_room
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The title Anadolia is a portmanteau of the words "anagram" and "pareidolia.”
Picasso claimed to capture all aspects of a sitter by showing both the front and sides of a face at once. But today, Cubist distortions can feel grotesque or diminutive, revealing a tension between artist and subject. With Campbell’s women, the psychology is different. The artist has taken semiotic cues from the past, but moved beyond its influence–instead evoking in her portraits self-expression, empathy, and radical acceptance. -