Jessica Segall
Brooklyn, NY
Residency: August – September 2012
About the Residency:
My residency at Sculpture space offered me the time, tools and financial support to create new sculptural work and process through ideas. Before my residency, in 2011, I traveled to the arctic and shot a video work that I intended to show as part of a sculptural installation. I had partial plans to fabricate the work, but not the tools, time or expertise to begin this project. The plan was to make a “cold plate” essentially a copper screen, soldered to copper tubing containing freon, and connected to a freezer compressor and condensing unit. This cold plate would then crystallize, creating a surface for video projection, recreating the original atmospheric conditions of the video work from the arctic. During my residency at Sculpture Space, I was able to use the facilities to try out a number of variations of my project. I connected with local small businesses, specializing in plumbing and HVAC that helped me design and fabricate the cold plate. The finished project was included as part of my installation at The International Symposium for Electronic Art in Albuquerque, NM on Sept. 22nd, where I used the screen as part of an off – grid drive – in. Upon its return to Sculpture Space, I built an oak frame to house the unit and install it as an indoor piece. In addition to the cold plate, I continued working on a long term project, a wooden boat I have been building for the past 3 summers. I hand carved 5 oars at Sculpture Space. The ephemera of these two project, in my studio took a life of their own and I began to see potential for the oars and scrapped freezer units as sculptures in their own right. I built two speaker / pedestals to serve as platforms for the scrapped freezer and to function as the audio for my video work.
About the Artist:
Jessica Segall is an American artist and musician living in New York City. Her work has been exhibited at the International Syposium for Electronic Art, The Havana Bienal, The National Gallery of Indonesia, The Queens Museum of Art, The Mongolian National Modern Art Gallery and the The Aldrich Museum. Jessica is the recipient of an Art Matters grant, the l.i.a.e.p. Travel Grant, The Gatsby Charitable Foundation Fund, an Emerging Artist Fellowship from Socrates Sculpture Park, a Jerome Fellowship from Franconia Sculpture Park and an emergency grant from The Foundation for Contemporary Art.
She has attended artist residencies at Skowhegan, Land Art Mongolia, The Arctic Circle and Künstledorf Schöppingen. Jessica is a graduate of Bard College and received her MFA from Columbia University.