STATEMENT

Jessica is a multi-hyphenate artist. Her work explores moment, movement, memory, and materiality. Inspired by yin and yang and by being a fraternal twin, she investigates dualities such as chaos and control, darkness and light, and stagnation and flow. She is interested in the interplay of spatial relationships as simile and metaphor across her surfaces. Working within an expanded field of contemporary abstraction, she translates inner and outer landscapes, including emotions, dreams, sounds, sights, and fleeting sensations of light, into a visual language shaped by improvisation in color, gesture, and mark.

She is primarily a painter, creating physical and digital drawings and collages. She also works as a photojournalistic-style photographer, an experienced graphic designer, and an occasional poet. Her painting practice incorporates a wide range of materials, including acrylic paint, latex house paint, spray paint, oil sticks, oil pastels, colored pencil, collage, digital drawings, photographs, and found elements such as glitter, torn paper, and industrial plastics on canvas, wood, or paper. Built through layered gestures that may evolve over months or emerge in a single energetic session, her process balances intention and chance. Drips, washes, and overpainting help shape the constantly shifting surface.

Her inspiration emerges from both internal experience and the surrounding world. Growing up in central upstate New York, spending summers by the sea in New England, and later living for decades in New York City cultivated a sensitivity to the rhythms of both natural and urban environments. Early interests in fantasy-making through music, fashion, magazines, photography, and interior design, along with immersive experiences in nature observing biological forms, a passion for pop culture, ingrained visual cues from her work as a luxury graphic designer, strong family and friend connections, and reflections on life as the wife of a drummer and mother of one, continue to inform the sensibility of her work in both autobiographical and observational ways.

Through intuitive moves and material experimentation, her work becomes a space for reflection, emotional resonance, and open interpretation. It unfolds as a dialogue between artist, medium, and inspiration, accumulating gestures that embody relationship, risk, and vulnerability.

BIO

Jessica Krause Smith lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She earned her Studio Art degree in Painting and Graphic Design from Skidmore College, graduating with honors in 1997. Her paintings have been exhibited widely, including at IFAC Arts, Walter Wickiser Gallery, LIC Arts, and Sotheby’s. She has had notable solo exhibitions: Natural Tendencies at IFAC Arts at The Yard on the Lower East Side in 2024, PIRO’KLASTIK at Yashar Gallery in Brooklyn in 2017, Abstractions in New Hartford, NY in 2016, and others. Her recent group exhibitions include Echoes at Yashar Gallery in Greenpoint, Brooklyn (2025), Inner Worlds, Outer Forms at Saint Marks Arts in the East Village (2024), Vivid Vibrations at The Yard Gowanus, Brooklyn (2023), and Mapping the Abstract at Pinkwater Gallery in Kingston, NY (2023). Her work is also featured in the permanent collection of the Tang Museum at Skidmore College and in numerous private collections across the U.S.