JESSICA IRENE JOYCE |
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Jessica Irene Joyce is an artist in a long-term relationship with painting. She paints to document relationships to self, materials, and ecologies, and how these are transformed by reading about and living through the impacts of climate change. Created with salvaged, traded, and repurposed materials, her paintings suggest a gentle path to reciprocity between artist and environment.
Jessica moved from Montreal to London, Ontario to pursue her MFA research on climate anxiety, which culminated in an exhibition titled, How can I be OK with the e/and of the world? at artLAB gallery in the summer of 2024. The gathered paintings and accompanying written dossier came to life as a result of being haunted by an intense emotional resistance to reading more than three chapters of Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014). During the process of forming relationships with the land colonially known as London, Jessica adopted plein air painting techniques to depict scenes from the Sherwood Fox Arboretum and Mount Pleasant Cemetery. Jessica holds a BFA in Studio Arts with a specialization in painting from Concordia University and an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of Western Ontario. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Art and Visual Culture at the University of Western Ontario. Her paintings have been exhibited in Montreal, St. John’s, and throughout Southwestern Ontario. In 2024, her writing was featured in the exhibition catalogue for Are you buying these with loonies or toonies? by the Tom Thomson Art Gallery. In 2023, she wrote, illustrated, and self-published a graphic novel titled, Diner Witch. In 2020, Jessica’s series of original oil paintings titled, Portraits of NDG, was reproduced as a calendar in partnership with Notre-Dame-des-Arts, a community organization funding free arts and culture events in Montreal. For more information, please visit her website. |
Work by Jessica Joyce
“The dance of concealing and revealing",
Discontinuous collaboration with Rylee Rumble, oil paint on repurposed painting,
48 by 60 inches,
2023
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“Little friend",
Oil paint on repurposed canvas stretched on repurposed moulding,
9 by 12 inches,
2023
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“Don’t look too closely",
Oil paint on new canvas stretched on
repurposed molding,
16 by 19 inches,
2024
“The space between us",
Watercolour and gouache on repurposed birch panel
Painted en plein air in Mount Pleasant Cemetery
8 by 10 inches,
2023
“Parallel lives",
Watercolour and gouache on repurposed birch panel,
Painted en plein air in Mount Pleasant Cemetery,
4 by 12 inches,
2023
“The end of an imagined future",
Watercolour and gouache on repurposed birch panel
Painted en plein air in Mount Pleasant Cemetery,
9 by 13 inches,
2023
“Forgotten vessels",
Watercolour and gouache on repurposed birch panel,
Painted en plein air in Mount Pleasant Cemetery,
4 by 12 inches,
2023
“No matter is created or destroyed / only transformed",
Oil paint on new canvas stretched on new wood,
Each 36 by 48 inches,
2023
