Jennifer Masley ( She/her )

Working from a library of symbols derived from a combo of pop-culture and art history, I construct porcelain sculptures that aim to reflect the complexity and absurdity of our present moment. Made from the combined forms of suggestive produce, love hearts, clowns and snails, these monsters pull from complex characters in cartoons like bugs bunny or are caricatures of contemporary slang or memes. I use slip cast porcelain to support the repetition of symbols and employ a majolica surface technique to unify the objects, creating a visual language that slides between abstraction and representation. The double entendre throughout my work is intentional and tethers attitudes from the past and present. The process used to make my work is left open to evolve naturally within the materially and technical limitations I've set. My goal in this work is to borrow from tropes found in comedy and tragedy to not reflect the current moment but to rhyme with it.

Jennifer Masley is an artist born and raised in central Texas. She earned her B.F.A. from Texas State University and her M.F.A. from Kent State University with a concentration in ceramics. Her work has been exhibited at the Artist Archive of the Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio, the San Angelo Museum of Fine Art and numerous conferences and symposiums including Sculpture X, NCECA and the CAN Triennial. She was a visiting artist at the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2022 and was a recent Artist-in-Residence at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Maine (2024) and Anderson Ranch art Center in Colorado (2024).

Jennifer’s research practice also includes experimental and curatorial projects. Some solo projects include a 10-week installation project using 800 pounds of unfired clay within a shipping container at Outside the Box Residency in Akron, Ohio (2023), and an outdoor pop-up with PLZ DONT MOW at a garden center in Bath, Ohio (2024). In 2020 she co-curated an ephemeral exhibition titled “3 uhauls in the library parking lot” where 3 U-haul trucks were converted into temporary open-air exhibition spaces.