Reviews

URBAN(E) LANDSCAPES AT LASCANO GALLERY
March 2-April 9, 2006

Painting is alive and well in Great Barrington, and the proof is on Main
Street in "Take to the City, Take to the Country,"

It's not nostalgia for our Industrial past that drives Jessica Hess'
interest in old buildings.  For her, factory buildings are like paintings
themselves.  Rectilinear (made up of lines, volumes, colors, shapes, stains,
and scars), her buildings are surfaces loaded with history.  In painting
them she respects their geometric orderliness, revels in gridded windows,
smokestacks, loading docks, and power lines whose taut or loopy presence
divides the space in useful ways.

In "Power Plant #1," she captures the industrial glow of a working factory
lit up in winter, set back dramatically across a half-frozen body of water
like a cathedral of secular energy.  And in "Quonset #3," under dull but
beautifully painted gray skies, she divides the canvas into horizontal
sections, the one-story factory building topped with a generous array of
behatted vents running "coast to coast" with architectural regularity.  How
many shades of gray does Hess employ to connect the punishing harmony of
factory life with the lugubrious clouds overhead?

Many of her "subjects" are tagged with wild-style graffiti, some
appropriated from photographs of defaced buildings, and some made up on her
own out of respect for the "train-bombing" subculture of the 80s.  Just a
few years out of RISD, where she graduated in 2003, graffiti gives this
street-smart, punchy realist a chance to show off a fearless color sense
that contributes convincingly to the four-square, head-on presentation of
buildings we feel we know but have rarely really looked at.
                                                                   
                              --Geoffrey Young