Jessica Shapiro’s improvisational art making process creates a personal record of hyper focus, play, overstimulation, repetition, chaos and calm. Her work moves fluidly between pure abstraction and ambiguous objectivity, drawing upon forms from nature, the figure, from memory & dreams and diagnostic imaging.

She received her BA from Bard College and MFA from the University of Chicago and lives and works in Chicago, IL.

***

Rock [ igneous ] with the
weight
of a plume, you are the blind

Assassin:
a sedimentary
laminate
clearly-formed
in a wafer slate or tuff--

Carrying flakes of cash
cut into four inch squares
of astro turf

your face freezes
and cracks wrinkles
in its (almost)
thirtieth year.

A rodule of transient noses,
cylinders of reel and tackle and
arrows roll

Around the median section
of the tuber-- Mine
is among
zinnias and
echos [the breath
of a baby].

Only the floor model desk and
dart eyes hemming in the bones of a briar-spherical will

ray prim you

perpetually salvaging a button,
I think its tender,
says she.

A single prison of the
soft peak of fury --bric-a-brac and
[ a cinnamon rambler ]
of remains!

Make-up with
cheeks like Charlotte,
or Queen Anne’s Lace
pricking the thistle of spine and arrow
of thornlet to be driven back
enraciné,

Rugosa, Rugosa,
I am an axis-tigella
of penducule inside

perpetual decay.