CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA- Second Street Gallery is pleased to present an Artist Residency exhibition featuring artist Jessica Burnam, to be held in the Dové Gallery.

For this exhibition, Second Street Gallery has selected Jessica Burnam to set up a studio in the Dové Gallery where she will both work and exhibit throughout her residency. Visitors will have the unique opportunity to experience Burnam’s process firsthand, watching as art is created and hung on the gallery walls. The residency will coincide with the exhibition in the Main Gallery, entitled Inside the Artist’s Studio, in which local artists are paired with photographers to document their progress as they complete work specifically for the exhibition. Burnam will bring the Artist’s Studio directly to Second Street Gallery visitors, allowing them to interact first hand with her as she creates her work.

Jessica Burnam creates families of abstracted bodies and souls to explore how vulnerability, growth, and decay etch themselves on the landscape that is the body. She is fascinated by science fiction, the symbolism of boats and of ladders, and by all manner of small and significant things: appendages and apertures, biomorphic systems and fantastic abnormalities, cold glass and little buds that bristle. She received her BA with highest honors in sculpture from the University of Virginia in 2015 and was a recipient of the Aunspaugh Post-Baccalaureate Fellowship at the University of Virginia from 2015 to 2016. She was an Artist-in-Residence at Anderson Ranch and her solo show, Vessel, was exhibited at Hillyer Art Space, Washington, D.C. She currently holds a studio practice in Mount Rainier, MD., and has a forthcoming solo exhibition at Red Dirt Studio.

The Residency Exhibition opens at Second Street on First Friday, February 1, 2019 from 5:30-7:30 pm, with remarks by the curator and artists at 6:30pm.

Established in 1973, Second Street Gallery is a nonprofit contemporary art space located in Charlottesville, Virginia. Admission is free and donations are appreciated. The Gallery is open Tuesday-Saturday; 11am- 6pm. Second Street Gallery is located at 115 Second Street SE, Charlottesville, VA. For more information, please visit our website: www.secondstreetgallery.org

Press contact: Kristen Chiacchia at [email protected] or 434-977-7284