JESS MACHACEK

Those Gentle Waves of Pay Dirt draws upon research supported by Columbus State University’s Visiting Artist + Scholars Residency Program (2021-22). First shown at the Corn Center for the Visual Arts, Illges Gallery (2022), the exhibition combines architectural installation, sculpture, drawing and print to point at materials shaped by hinterland and urban processes (concrete, sand, water). Elements of the project carefully position physical futures in contradiction with an extractivist reality specific to the history of Southeastern United States.

Machacek and Enos’ work begins with a set of conditions laid bare by the re-contouring of the Chattahoochee River to make way for Columbus’s (GA) notorious urban whitewater course and Wave Shaper. It then pulls upon socio-environmental issues of conservation and permanence at odds with instances of preservation, leisure, and decline through the comparable sites of Oxbow Meadows, Providence Canyon, and Callaway Gardens.

(collaboration with James Enos)

A series of 16x20 archival inkjet prints– constructed image abstractions using photographs taken during the Visiting Artist & Scholar Residency Program at Columbus State University. Specific sites include: Callaway Gardens & Robin Lake Beach (Pine Mountain, GA), Providence Canyon (Lumpkin, GA), Waveshaper Island (Columbus, GA).

Contexture of the Fore involves a series of image combinations carefully interlaced together, which in turn stoke visual memories from conspicuous positions. Drawing inspiration from Connectivity Tables surrounding the elucidation of place and time— the project combines textural snapshots taken across the port cities of Hamburg (DE), Helsinki (FI), Yokohama (JP), Taipei (TW), Zhuhai (CN), and Lamma Island (HK) between 2017-19. Responding to Josef Albers Interaction of Color, the work augments travel photographs into dreams, i.e., recollections akin to contextual sensitivity in motion.

(collaboration with James Enos)

“For her series Two Waves/Sunset Mode, Jess Machacek uses both conventional artistic media and prefabricated domestic materials. She employs latex paint, linoleum, vinyl, and plastic in novel ways. Machacek’s materials point to her interest in domestic environments, such as the manicured suburban lawn. In Tankini, printed elastic stretches across a wood background. A faint palm frond pattern on the blonde wood recalls tan lines and echoes the print of the fabric above. Given the evocation of skin, it’s one of Machacek’s more figurative works in Monologue. There’s an implicit relationship to printmaking, too. The duplicated marks of a tan line recall stencil-based printing techniques. Bathing suits, sunscreen, and tanning beds are among the many ways—natural and artificial—that we adorn and modify our bodies.

Sunset Sag shows a yellow disk of painted window screen over horizontal bands of warm coral and rosy pink. A drooping band of cut-up lawn chair webbing hangs from the rectilinear supports, imbuing the work with a sculptural quality. Sunset Sag suggests both a seascape at dusk and kitschy beach architecture. Beauty and the mundane coalesce; such dualities appear throughout Two Waves/Sunset Mode. While Sunset Sag recalls the sun, other works allude to a celestial theme. Calling to mind the moon, Total Eclipse features a black orb bisected by a gray linoleum rectangle with an ersatz marble pattern augmented by semicircles. The title also conjures Bonnie Tyler’s 1983 pop ballad “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” This nod to the 1980s evokes both humor and nostalgia. It perhaps points to resonance with the decade’s style in Machacek’s work, particularly the recently revived Memphis design movement.

Machacek’s work in Monologue draws attention to oft-ignored materials, allowing them to transcend their utilitarian functions. She explores contemporary Americana with a blend of levity and seriousness. It’s a vision of cultivated, suburban utopia in which nature and artifice harmoniously coexist.”

(from the exhibition catalogue, Monologue: Five Contemporary Printmakers)

Curated by Rebecca Brantley & Brian Hitselberger

Mason-Scharfenstein Museum of Art | Demorest, GA

mirrored acrylic, plywood, lattice fence, beach screen, linoleum tile, latex paint, color flakes, spray paint, louver gable vent

Lamar Dodd School of Art | Athens, GA

“Dodd alumna and Athens-based artist, Jess Machacek’s Endless Summer extends on her practice of using home improvement materials that mimic the natural world such as pool vinyl, plastic ponds, and Astroturf. In this work, the artificial and the real blur as a nostalgic summer landscape emerges. Paint is chosen for its descriptive titles—Beach House, Ocean Sigh, Summer Gold—and well-worn vacation aesthetics are abstracted in line and color. A sunset seagull hovers over it all, a reminder of the best summer ever.”

Curated by Katie Geha

latex paint, plywood, mirrored acrylic, window screen, inkjet print, lattice fence

Site-specific wall work selected for Cousin, a group exhibition curated by Ridley Howard– included in Scott Ingram’s exhibition Til the Lights Go Out

Hathaway Contemporary | Atlanta, GA

Howard’s Gallery | Athens, GA

D O M E S T I C S T R U C T U R E S

Featuring works from In Kyoung Chun, Meta Gary, Brittainy Lauback, Elizabeth Lide, Jess Machacek, Lauren O’Connor-Korb, and Christina Price Washington

Curated by Candice Greathouse

ATHICA | Athens, GA

Two-person exhibition and collaboration with Ella Weber

Project Project | Omaha, NE

stainless steel, pool vinyl, above ground pool wall foam & pool cove, artificial hostas, latex paint, accent floor lamps, wood lattice air conditioner screen, plastic pale, satellite, silver coating, window film, wood post

Group exhibition, Appetite for Destruction, at The Wassaic Project in Wassaic, NY

June 12 - September 18

2016

mixed media + audio

(greenhouse, artificial fern, window film, wallpaper, archival inkjet print, rug, faux rock enclosures, faux rock speakers, floor lamp, plaster, base molding, artificial turf, latex paint, spray paint, wood) 

MFA Candidates Exhibition

ADAC | Atlanta, GA

cast plaster, artificial turf, stone tile, hose, spigot, lamp, spray paint, wood

MFA Candidates Exhibition 

Georgia Museum of Art  | Athens, GA

2015

With a rectilinear arrangement in white, accessorized by a looping yellow line, Jessica Machacek transforms materials from the garden section of any Home Depot or Lowes supply store into a sculptural installation of clear aesthetic intent. What the work on view at the Georgia Museum of Art, entitled Plot, suggests is the equally transformative, aesthetic nature of people’s efforts in their own plots of land: the suburban American yard.

Suburban American is invoked not merely in the yellow rubber hose, coming from a water spigot attached to the wall, but in the perfectly level grass of white Astroturf and fake pavement it lays upon. Absurdly the hose is not functional, nor does the artificial grass require watering. On the wall, a grid of nine white plaster squares backs this tableaux. A spotlight from a bulb on a tripod refocuses the viewer’s attention on what seems to be a product built for decorative garden edging, a pile of white rocks. In fact, the artist made each rock by hand, replicating an easily obtained consumer object through time-consuming and repetitive labor. Consumerism fascinates the artist. Machacek’s labor not only critiques the easy consumerism with which we prune and ornament our little fiefdoms of outdoor space, but indicts the artist as a willing participant in the endless cycle with which we try to uphold artificial standards for natural beauty.

The consumerist interests of the artist are subdued in the ghostly Plot, which functions like the photographic negative of a twinned work, Vivarium Dream (Model #701634)(2015). Vivarium Dream, a multi-part installation comprised of a commercially-available greenhouse, sound, garden items of faux materials, and printed images, formed the basis for Plot quite literally. The artist molded the white plaster squares of Plot’s back wall in the clear plastic squares provided for the DIY greenhouse. The Astroturf and tile in Plot matches the footprint of the greenhouse, which also contains the handmade rocks. The artificial ambitions of man’s engagement with “nature,” as relativized in the American backyard, is seen more clearly in Vivarium Dream, where an impossibly long and bright fake fern dangles in front of the reproduction of a waterfall.

This body of work shows the artist’s concern with clarifying her and our relationship to something as ostensibly simple as a smooth green lawn. Particularly in installations like Plot, one sees how much ideas of nature have become unnatural. While such considerations are hardly new—one need only look as far as the picturesque reaction to the formal gardens of Versailles—in Machacek’s work they speak to a contemporary American moment inherited from the 1950s and closely tied to suburbia and the American dream.

(from the exhibition catalogue, written by Linnea West)

window screen + latex paint on panel, insulation foam, vinyl pond liner, preformed plastic pond, rubber sealant, wood + latex paint + resin, hinges

Group Exhibition at Southeastern Louisiana University Contemporary Art Gallery in Hammond, LA

October 15 - November 13

2015

mirror privacy window film

Completed with support from the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts Graduate Research Award

Lamar Dodd School of Art, The University of Georgia

2013-2014

Pop-up exhibition in collaboration with Elliot Walters and Tess Strickland

Bulldog Inn | Athens, GA