Jamie Powell

Jamie Powell was born in Fairmont West Virginia 30 miles south of the Mason Dixon Line to a family of farmers and factory workers. Her Appalachian roots encouraged a culture of reuse, repurposing, patching and stitching. She has an interest in exploring the boundaries of what paintings can be through a highly experimental process of dying, braiding, weaving, stitching, dyeing and staining raw canvas. Intimate feminine domestic gestures become grand moments in her paintings. Over-sized and out of control bows pull away from the stretcher…. braided canvas falls to the floor. These paintings become physical three-dimensional objects. The scale references the body, the size of a head, the torso, or outstretched arms. Influences range from Robert Rauschenberg to Jessica Stockholder, from Arte Povera to Pattern and Decoration movements, from Formalism to Feminism. She has exhibited extensively over the last seventeen years including: Soil Gallery in Seattle, David & Schweitzer and Fresh Window in Brooklyn, Freight + Volume and Morgan Lehman in New York. She is currently represented by The Painting Center in New York. She has received grants from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Vermont Studio Center and Pratt Institute.