Jessy Park Meets Casio Down a Technicolour Street
I love the art of Jessy Park. Like many (I presume) I first found out about Jessy Park when reading Oliver Sacks An Anthropologist on Mars (an excellent read by the way). According to Oliver Sacks Jessy Park is autistic (although it makes me feel awkward and uncomfortable to mention that because I think too often people can be easily reduced to a digestible label and in being reduced may not be seen for who they are entirely as a person, as a heart-beating, eye-blinking, thought-producing human being).Â
Anyway, the apparent thing I love about Jessy Park’s art is how it seems to combine the psychedelic with the ordered, the utterly personal with the impersonal. Her paintings are so structured and almost mathematical in appearance (very geometric) but the colours within the depicted forms are flamboyant, chaotic and unexpected. All together for me the effect is finally a whimsical one where anything is possible. I think ultimately Jessy Park is praising the ordered, the structured, the sensical through her works. Architecture (the prodigious daughter of logic and physical law) is after all her main subject matter. And maybe in this way Jessy helps to remind us that the systematic is not entirely devoid of a unique beauty and extravagance. Through the windows of Jessy Park’s imagination we can perhaps see the colour in our own ordinary routines, the far stretching kaleidoscopic patterns that are formed by our own mundane rituals (morning train rides, daily supermarket visits, evening news watching). The lives we touch, connect with and influence along a seemingly ordinary road. She doesn’t obscure or distort the ordinary completely but rather filters aspects of the real in a celebratory way. I wish I could live in a world like Jessy Park's. I wish the skies, the buildings and churches of my city were as colourful, but maybe, in a weird way, the whole point is they naturally are.
I think what also attracts me to Jessy’s work is her commitment to form. The buildings depicted are absolutely recognisible, Jessy doesn’t seem to treat architecture with any amount of disrespect. The iconicity of the Chrysler Building is accurately translated in Jessy’s The Chrysler Building with Perihelion and Transit of Venus # 2. The magnificence of her chosen subjects is always articulated and almost emphasised through her unique use of colour where the chosen hues clash violently. It’s an accurate representation but also an entirely personal one. The artwork of Jessy Park ultimately uplifts my soul.
And this watch by Casio for me is totally Jessy Park. If I ever become obese I will buy this watch and wear it to every takeaway joint I visit. The colours are amazing, I like how they clash hideously. Perhaps you wouldn’t imagine, in the primary, that blue and orange would go together. And perhaps they don’t. But in not going together, in not creating this pleasant coalesce for the eyes they bring about something else, something abstract and fundamentally higher. And maybe in seeing this I come to learn that life is not always about harmony, bumpless roads and ill defined borders. Contrast has its place. Contrast has its message, many messages perhaps. This not coming together creates alternatively an obvious delineation that perhaps speaks about individuality, about the differences that may macroscopically separate us but on closer inspection ultimately unite us.
