Various Small Fires is thrilled to announce the opening of Jessie Homer French’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. Following her inclusion in the 49th Venice Biennale and the Hammer Museum’s acclaimed Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living Biennial, Normal Landscapes presents a collection of anti-pastoral paintings that playfully reflect on the absurdity of earthly existence through French’s whimsical depictions of death, environmental catastrophes, and rural life.
For over five decades, French has cultivated a self-taught, “regional narrative painting” style, one in which flat bold color is met with irony and meticulous brushstrokes to construct poignant compositions. Her recent paintings continue in this vein and range in subject matter from gamboling Los Angeles coyotes and bears ambling up snowy peaks to searing wildfires and cemeteries inhabited by lost friends, visible to the viewer in a cross section view along the bottom quarter of the canvas. Here too are fish swimming upstream, panoramas of rivers and bays, paw and hoof prints in the snow - normal landscape things. And, as in all normal landscapes we encounter, whether on view or not, normal transformation is afoot.
As such, death and life preoccupy the artist - as one might expect from someone rounding the middle of their eighth-decade on this planet. But for French, it isn’t a sole focus on the doom and gloom of one’s inevitable mortality so much as the fact that death is just part of life, whether that death is of our loved ones, ourselves, ecosystems, animals, or other life forms. It’s simply a moment that marks profound change and what could be more normal than that?
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Jessie Homer French (b. 1940, New York, New York, lives and works in Mountain Center, California) is a self-taught, self-proclaimed “regional narrative painter” who routinely, perhaps even obsessively, paints archetypes of death, nature, and rural life. She has held solo exhibitions at Massimo De Carlo, London, UK; Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, Dallas and Seoul, South Korea; Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin and London; the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, California; Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica, California; Winchester Gallery, Victoria, British Columbia; and Ankrum Gallery, Los Angeles. Her work has also been included in group exhibitions at Francois Ghebaly, Los Angeles; CLEARING, New York; the Palm Springs Museum; Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach; and Samuel Freeman Gallery, Santa Monica. French’s work is included in the permanent collection of the Dallas Museum of Art, Palm Spring Art Museum and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She was included in the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, and the Hammer Museum’s Biennial in 2023.
