Jessica Rohrer

Jessica Rohrer holds an MFA in Painting from the Yale University School of Art and a BA from Northwestern University, and completed post-graduate work at the Art Institute of Chicago. She has been awarded multiple residencies, including Yaddo, Wave Hill, and the Guttenberg Space and Time Residency. Her work is held in numerous private collections and has been exhibited widely in galleries and museums across the United States, including P.P.O.W. Gallery in New York. She has been reviewed in publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Artforum, Hyperallergic, Art in America, and The New Yorker.

For more than a decade, the source material for her paintings has been the homes and neighborhoods she has inhabited, from her birthplace in Wisconsin to  New Jersey, where she currently lives and works. Her recent work draws from drone photography, using aerial views of residential landscapes to examine representation, public versus private space, identity, memory, and the impulse to control one’s surrounding environment. Often labor-intensive, the paintings reflect a meticulous and exacting approach to image-making.

“In my paintings I usually create a grid and carefully plot how lines and edges fall within the picture plane. The purposeful and exacting presentation of the imagery reflects the importance of formal considerations in the work, and the obsessive attention to detail contributes to the heightened sense of tension present in many of these pieces.

This obsessiveness extends to my interest in the notion of public and private space. My most recent work is based on drone photography. The drone itself is socially loaded, viewed both as a tool of surveillance and as an everyday leisure activity. These aerial images lay bare the physical and socioeconomic elements of neighborhoods through the meticulous depiction of homes, cars, swimming pools, and outdoor furniture. At the same time, the details can feel representative or generic—the houses and cars could be almost anywhere, revealing little about the families who remain out of sight.

Just as we carefully attempt to manipulate others’ perception of us, so too do I wish to curate the viewer’s perception of my subject matter. Traveling above and around these spaces, I sometimes focus closely on individual elements and at other times pull back to emphasize the patterns of rooftops and yard grids. Familiar, mundane details are given equal importance, resulting in an abundance of information that is carefully organized and staged, inviting reflection on how perspective shapes experience.”

Jessica Rohrer