Jessica Burleson: Don’t Touch

March 4-26, 2022
Jessica Burleson: Don’t Touch
Opening reception: Friday, March 4, 5:00-9:00 PM
Gallery hours: Monday-Friday, 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM, Saturday, 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM and Friday, March 25, 9:00 AM – 7:00 PM.

Jessica Burleson is a Panamanian-American artist and recent Knoxville transplant. Her artistic career began in 2005 when she received an Honorable Mention Award in the Regional Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. She was then invited to participate in the Scholastics National Student Show in New York, where she was awarded the 2005 American Vision Award. This achievement secured her calling in the arts, leading her to receive a BFA and study art abroad in Florence, Italy. Throughout her artistic career she received numerous awards, publications, and grants while also contributing to group shows and festivals. Her debut solo exhibition, Don’t Touch, speaks to her experience of femininity and nature through the materiality and objectivity of paint. This collection of acrylic paintings is created from acrylic skins and impasto cake decorating techniques to form a painterly collage of textures and control. Burleson manipulates the material to exist beyond its presumed physicality to acknowledge its presences and natural abilities – a voyeuristic gaze into femininity as deliciously unattainable and sacral.

The consumption of divine femininity, nature and art is my inspiration in creating. My works are both material and delicate with savory textures – a reflection of the embodiment of femininity and nature that is met by the world with an all-consuming hunger. I compose impossibly thick, icing-like, touch-worthy feminine floral elements, a visual delicacy one can only hope to resist the temptation to touch. I speak to the exploitation of femininity as a pound of flesh to be devoured. My work lives in a world where worth is not of the body but within one’s essence, where femininity is allowed to remain sacred and untouched by burden, blooming into its full potential – living beyond objectification and allowed to accept our full spectrum of self.

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