Jon Wessel

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Website

http://www.jonwessel.com

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(415) 819-4808

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I watch my city of San Francisco evolve - buildings get destroyed and built, roads get paved and resurfaced, companies come and go. A part of this dynamic movement and change are the marks left behind in the everyday urban landscape. These marks, both intentional and unintentional, may include graffiti, tags, signage, paint rollers marks from graffiti abatement, pavement signs, skid marks, sidewalk cracks, scratch marks, torn billboard ads. To me, these marks represent fragments of time. Ones that will inevitable change and fade away. This fact keeps me incredibly humbled to the reality that everything eventually passes.

As a visual artist, I am also interested in these urban marks for their inherent everyday beauty, as well as their relationship with more formal ways of art making. For example, I see complex surfaces in the city street that many painters would love to achieve on their canvas, or a marker line on a back alley wall that might rival an expressive gesture on a clean sheet of cotton paper in someone’s studio. To me, there is a universality to mark and gestures; I like to play with the connection between what is typically known as “studio work” and art that is found by walking around the city.