Jesse Mockrin makes paintings about paintings. She draws inspiration from our existing image repertoire, ranging from French Neo-classical paintings to adolescent fan art. Conflating these sources with her own body of photography, she endeavors to create a contemporary dialogue with the history of figurative painting.
The images shown here are studies for one such painting project that explores desire and the threshold at which reality shatters fantasy. The struggle to believe in a fantasy - to believe in an adolescent vampire lusting after one's own blood - mirrors the naïve but tempting belief in the power of figurative painting in the context of contemporary practice. Jesse aims to explore the area painting and fantasy both tread upon, the fault line between longing and disillusionment.
