About

Jessica Rankin approaches painting as a speculative act of world building. Her exuberant, abstract compositions draw upon her own memories, imagination, and visual references, but also explicitly incorporate embroidered citations from queer and women poets. Rankin’s paintings are spaces of encounter: between lines of text, thread, and paint, but also between her own practice and the poetry of the writers she admires such as Kamilah Aisha Moon, Carl Phillips, Lisel Mueller, Etel Adnan, and Sappho.

While her earlier paintings were more closely linked to processes of chance and improvisation, …