- An encounter with a young emerging artist
Born and raised in Toronto, Jessica Thalmann is a young emerging painter and photographer currently completing third year of her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Arts and English at York University. Fluent in both English and French, she attended the Toronto French School for 13 years before pursuing a career as a curator and artist in the Toronto art scene. During the summer of 2008, she has traveled to New York and studied at the Parsons School of Design for Painting and Drawing.
Thalmann’s painting practice focuses on the subway and public transportation system as it is seen as a daily monotonous experience that is very intimate and personal. Large-scale black and white oil and acrylic paintings link themes of urban decay with environments of abandonment or isolation. How does a person experience a space that is being transformed and discarded?
Of Swiss and Jewish descent, Thalmann’s new photographic work entitled Projections incorporates her mixed cultural heritage in photographs that examine the notions of personal narratives and histories across time. Photographing Holocaust survivors in their homes while projecting images of them in their youth during the war. The series comments on the very nature of image making and the value of photographs as documents of trauma, happiness and change. This series investigates personal cultural heritage that obliquely affects the fragmented nature of identity. I am trying to see how the remnants of such an event can trickle down throughout generations and still somehow haunt the affected families.
Jessica Thalmann has been organizing and curating exhibitions of emerging artists in the downtown Toronto scene. She has recently been shown at galleries such as Whippersnapper Gallery, Keep 6 Contemporary, the Arts and Letters Club and the Bata Shoe Museum. She has also been accepted in Toronto’s upcoming Nuit Blanche 2009 with a project entitled Take Shelter. The project is an interactive installation/performance that deals with issues of homelessness, poverty and urban disasters.
Besides her current artistic endeavors, Thalmann is also the Editor in Chief of a student magazine at York University entitled Spotlight on Fine Arts publishing articles and artworks for the Fine Arts student body. She is involved in both the Creative Arts Student Association and the Visual Arts Student Association on York campus working to enhance student life on campus.
Contact:
25 KINGSBRIDGE CIRCLE • THORNHILL • ONTARIO • L4J8N8
PHONE: (416) 301-3305 • J_T_112@HOTMAIL.COM • WWW.JESSICATHALMANN.COM
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