Artist Statement
My artistic research focuses on print media as a means to expose the passage of time and consequential sensations of loss and absence. While investigating physiological and psychological experiences of absence, loss, and uncertainty I look to place and seek metaphors in humans’ built and natural environments. This has recently led me to research climate shifts and psychological impacts on humans; the loss humans experience as their environments change.
Time manifests in print media through multiples, labor, and delayed satisfaction. To emphasize the distance and absence that form as time passes I employ a muted palette and an elegant, minimal aesthetic. The works are two and three-dimensional, functioning best when dictated by the space in which they exist. My visual vocabulary combines hand-drawn, appropriated, and digitally rendered images from my immediate surroundings, personal archives, and the Internet. By overtly aestheticizing compositions I demonstrate a desire for order, logic, and control over the uncontrollable. The uncontrollable is synonymous with the work's continuous themes: the value of time and the inevitability of loss.
Bio
Tressa Jones is an artist and printmaker originally from Boston, MA, currently based in Pittsburgh, PA. She received her BS in Exercise Science from the University of Massachusetts, completed Post-Baccalaureate studies in Printmaking at New Mexico Highlands University, and earned an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Montana. Her travels and creative research, which include residencies at Kunstnarhuset Messen in Ålvik, Norway, the Lawrence Arts Center, KS, the Vermont Studio Center, and research on the landscape and Land Art of the American West, fuel her artistic investigation of time and its manifestations in the body, landscape, and built environment. Jones's studio practice is complemented by work at non-profit arts organizations and educational institutions. She is currently the Business Development Associate for The Art Supply Co. art consulting firm, instructs workshops at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts & Media, and is raising an awesome toddler.
