Bio & Artist Statement

Jessica Kallista is an educator, curator, and artist working in collage, video, music, and performance. She received her MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in poetry from George Mason University in 2002. In November 2014 she founded Olly Olly, an alternative arts community, in Fairfax, Virginia. Jessica has taught analog collage at Corcoran School of the Arts & Design and poetry, critical theory, aesthetics, writing for artists, and analog collage at George Mason University. Jessica is the 2022 recipient of George Mason University's Margaret C. Howell Outstanding Achievement Award. In 2023 she received George Mason University's Sojourner Truth Faculty Award.

Through an embodied knowing that is activated via connection to her child-self/higher-self, Jessica seeks to question the nature of love and reality by creating situations of healing, community, pleasure, and play. Jessica’s exploration of relationships and simulacra is expressed through references to film, philosophy, spirituality, self-portraiture, and pop-culture in elaborate and ongoing play and interaction with dolls, dioramas, and imagined realms.

Jessica’s work probes the ways in which bell hooks’ assertion that "Love is an action, never simply a feeling" is the most introspective guide to Jean Baudrillard’s finding that “We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.” Driven by curiosity around love, reality, and relational liberation, Jessica embraces a polymath ethic to create work that questions bonds and simulacra: What role does love play in knowing ourselves as real? How might play connect the self and the beloved? How does collage help us understand the fragmentary nature of our lives? In making things whole via collage, how might we gain an authentic understanding of ourselves? Art is raw material for more art, and Jessica’s reconfigurations enable her to trouble these questions and invite viewers into an immersive realm of imaginative play.

Jessica has exhibited work at a variety of venues including Tempus Projects, Galerie Kritiku Prague, Art Museum of the Americas, VisArts, Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art, Target Gallery, Otis Street Arts Project, Gillespie Gallery, and the Margaret W. and Joseph L. Fisher Art Gallery.