Hess Gallery 2019-2020 Exhibit Season 
September 1 - November 8, 2019
Artists' talk Sept. 25th, 4-6pm

"HumanFigure" opens in late August at the Hess. Six young artists, including PMC's own former boxing coach Jessica Liggero and art professor Jamie Bowman, interpret what it means to be human using expressive realism. Jamie Bowman, Holly Curcio, Erika Hess, Lavaughan Jenkins, Jessica Liggero and Tamar Nelson show sculpture, painting, drawing, and art that crosses borders between media. 

"Artists can, uniquely, bring a new face­—a new person—into existence, one which has symbolic qualities tailored to their needs and desires. The artists in this show use the human figure expressively, going beyond verisimilitude in order to express inner life through outward appearance. They create powerful images of humans for as many reasons as there are artists: to represent an idealized state, to get at the heart of what it is to see and be seen, to look in the mirror and discover what today’s emotional landscape reveals. To search out other human faces and our own, is hardwired in us. Realistic representations of human faces and bodies are more important signifiers now than they ever have been. We navigate the world, seeking to recognize each other, re-create memories for each other, and symbolize, memorialize, and codify experience using images of other humans."

Says Jessica: "My work is about identity. Passion. Betrayal. Lust. Who am I, or who have I become? The ambiguity of intimacy that develops introspectively and harmoniously or perhaps even insidiously at times as a bond is constructed, deconstructed and eventually reconstructed or destroyed. That’s what my work is about. It is all chaotic creative energy that somehow finds a way to fall vividly on victimless paper. "