Jessie Summa Russo: None & Everything
August 6 - 29, 2026
First Thursday Art Walk - Thursday August 6th, 5-8pm
Artist Reception - Friday August 14th, 5-8pm (Please RSVP)
Closing Reception - Saturday, August 29th, 4-6pm
Mixed-media collages blur abstraction and landscape through obsessively composed grids created over three decades and collected from three centuries.
Artist Statement
For years I've been trying to solve two problems at once: how to stop overworking my paintings, and how to stop overthinking everything else.
I started using grids because they gave me structure and freedom at the same time. I suspected that working with equal squares might let me indulge my instinct to add more without losing sight of the piece as a whole. They also gave me a strange kind of permission to finally use the paper ephemera I'd been saving for over three decades. During the pandemic, I taped a note in my studio that read: STOP SAVING THE "GOOD" STUFF. JUST USE IT. This was, incidentally, my philosophy on special-occasion wine at the time. But really...why did I keep all this stuff?
Each Hexadecad—a made-up word for a set of sixteen, inspired in part by the hexadecimal color codes I've been working with as a web designer since the '90s—combines fragments of my own monotypes with photographs, illustrations, magazine clippings, books, and other printed ephemera I've collected over the years. I get a little thrill every time I crop one of these "good" images into a two-inch square.
Once they're assembled, abstract marks begin to resemble rivers, roots, clouds, or lightning, while representational images of mountains, waves, animals, and minerals become abstract patterns, textures, and shapes. I don't plan this. I soften my focus, look for echoes in color or form, and keep turning each piece until it says, "Yeah, this is where I belong." Or, occasionally, "Good enough. Move on."
The title arrived partway through making the series. At first I was consciously looking for the four elements. Then I started noticing dendritic (branching) forms repeating everywhere in all four elements—both in imagery and even in the abstract marks created by ink applied too heavily to the gel plate. Eventually the thirty-two works began to feel like a multicellular organism of sorts, and I liked the idea of the organism continuing even if the individual hexadecads dispersed. None & Everything as a title ultimately came from flipping the familiar mental health advice to avoid all-or-nothing thinking.
All becomes None.
Or becomes And.
Nothing becomes Everything.
The tacks and twine are a nod to the detective's evidence board, trying to connect the clues. They also acknowledge my persistent desire to add just one more thing: another plane, another dimension, a little more imperfect geometry.