“The Blindspot of an Old Dream,” an exhibition of paintings and installation by New York City Artist Jessica Hargreaves, continues in The Teaching Gallery, located on the ground floor of the Administration Building, through Saturday, Feb. 11.
Gallery hours are 10 a.m.- 4 p.m. Tuesday, 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Wednesday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Thursday and Friday, and noon-4 p.m. Saturday through Friday, Dec. 16; admission is free to all.
Hargreaves will discuss her work and career on Thursday, Feb. 2 in the Bulmer Telecommunications Auditorium at HVCC. The hour-long talk will begin at 3 p.m.
Jessica Hargreaves’s paintings depict mundane, intimate and fraught human experiences through figurative and animal imagery placed in allegorical settings. Her style pays homage to familiar history paintings, but with added molded creatures – wild-eyed snakes, tigers, seahorses and dogs – bulging out of the canvas and meandering the gilded frame. A menagerie also permeates her decorative, yet disquieting toile wallpaper. Vladimir Putin, Oprah Winfrey, Ivanka Trump, Beyoncé and other recognizable figures populate her paintings that depict both fantastical and realistic settings, or an unsettling hybrid of both. Hargreaves states that her directness and technique “bring humanity’s convoluted and emotional landscape into high relief.”
Along with two other artists, Hargreaves co-directs Mother-in-Law’s, an experimental, installation-based project space in Germantown (Columbia County). She was born and raised in London, and earned a Bachelor’s degree with honors in fashion and textile design at Central Saint Martins (University of the Arts London). After working in fashion and illustration in NYC, she received a Master of Fine Arts degree from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. Since 2010, she has exhibited in numerous one-person and group exhibits throughout the greater NYC metropolitan area and beyond. Two posters she designed for the 2017 Women’s March in Washington, DC were acquired by the Museum of The City of New York. She currently lives and works in NYC.
Jessica Hargreaves: Snowvid, oil, acrylic and resin on wood panel and found frame, 30” x 35”