Jessamyn Box

Cheery and whimsical paintings offer a lift in dreary pandemic times.

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With their bright colours and whimsical titles, Calgary-based artist Jessamyn Box's abstract paintings seem an antidote to dreary pandemic times.

The base of each painting is a colour field – acid green, tomato red, midnight blue – that reveals traces of earlier mark-making. It’s overlaid by more strident elements that Box adds instinctively, mostly at a polite distance from each other. 

These elements, which range from pencil scribbles and painted grids to chalky circles and gushes of sprayed-on colour, feel like narratives. There are visual dialogues between the various elements, as well as tension between foreground and substrate, as some parts move forward while others recede. 

What is so enticing about these objects floating in space? Does it speak to isolation? The internal machinations of the mind? Or is it related to childhood geographies – growing up in the spaciousness of the prairies, or even the simple aesthetics of drawing on school chalkboards?

One painting in Box's exhibition, Works in Play, at Soul Gallery in Winnipeg from Oct. 14 to Oct. 30, is a nod to this final idea. Charlie’s Favourite Part of Detention was the Chalkboard in the Back has a dark ground that lets coloured objects pop out like debris floating in outer space. There’s a string of blue boxes, and something that resembles a drinking glass. And that jagged white line? Does it represent mountains or a crown?

Box speculates her approach simply replicates the way her mind works. 

“I always have a million things going on in my head in terms of thoughts and directions, and it seems awfully scattered,” says Box. “So, I feel working like that helps get a little of the different stories and shapes out on the canvas. It tends to work really well for me to have multiple shapes and different layers together. It’s sort of how I think, I guess.”

In another work, On Extra Chilly Mornings, Fern Ventured to the Blue Star Diner for her Favourite Fried Chicken and Buttermilk Pancakes, it’s the red background that dominates. The painting feels cozy, as if we are snuggled under a warm quilt, and the various elements seem muffled, their edges blurred and the colours muted. 

Box, who was born in Edmonton, is mostly self-taught. She studied theatre arts at what is now MacEwan University in Edmonton, and has worked as a sommelier, but found her way back to her childhood love of art when she started experimenting with paint when her two children, now 14 and 11, were young. She also took a few painting workshops at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design when she lived in Vancouver. 

Along with Soul Gallery, her work is represented by Gibson Fine Art in Calgary, the Empty Wall in Vancouver, and Gallery Merrick in Nanaimo, B.C. ■  

Jessamyn Box: Works in Play at the Soul Gallery in Winnipeg from Oct. 14 to Oct. 30, 2021.

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