Jessica Kennedy is a painter living and working in Albuquerque, NM. Born in Michigan in 1982, she earned a BFA with honors from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2005. Jessica then moved west to Albuquerque in 2006 to pursue an MFA at the University of New Mexico, where she graduated with distinction in 2009. She exhibits her complex, process-driven abstract paintings nationally and locally, notably at 516 arts, Fourteenfifteen Gallery, and the Harwood Art Center. Jessica is a former college professor and currently teaches art for Albuquerque Public Schools.
Artist Statement
Love of visual phenomena, meditative process, and the physicality of paint are the driving forces of my work and the complexities of the natural world are my major source for inspiration. In my densely layered acrylic paintings, I endeavor to depict, through abstraction, both the physical experience of our world and the underlying metaphysical that links everything and everyone.
I am currently working on a series called Beautiful Unwanted. An invasive species is a species that is not native to a specific location, and that tends to spread to a degree believed to cause damage to the environment, human economy, or human health. The paintings in this series, “Beautiful Unwanted,” deal with these powerful beings and the disastrous impact they have when introduced into foreign ecosystems, usually for reasons of human greed or naïve fascination with the unfamiliar or “exotic.” The paintings and paper works in the series are intended to acknowledge the destructive force of these species, while simultaneously honoring their aesthetic beauty and inherent value as life forms.
