Jessica Plattner: FACT and FANCY

Common Sense: 10546 115 street

“My paintings reflect my love of art history and my interest in all kinds of stories: literary, cultural, and personal. I’m particularly interested in where these stories overlap and contradict one another. How does our individual experience reflect and distort society’s archetypes?  In my work, I merge narratives from classical mythology or the bible with the personal stories or dreams of real people who model for me.

Some works focus more heavily on the literary narrative, while others focus entirely on the life story of the model. I want the viewer to connect with the characters I depict, and to question the influence of society’s narratives on the roles we all play in life.

My creative process involves extensive preparation for each piece, including conversations and interviews with models, research into literary or cultural sources, and study of relevant art-historical references. Rather than illustrating a narrative, I look for complex relationships between the real life of the model and the idealized life of the story. As each model’s experience is multifaceted and varied, each painting becomes more intricate throughout its development with layered visual and conceptual elements. The structure of each composition is informed by art history’s broad array of pictorial and painterly languages, from Italian Renaissance to German Expressionism to Mexican Social Realism.”