Hashimoto Contemporary is pleased to present The Chaos Aesthetic, a solo exhibition by Oakland-based artist Jessica Hess. The new body of work explores abstraction of architecture and the landscape through decay, rendered in oil on canvas.

Working from meticulously shot reference images the artist takes while exploring each location, Hess augments each composition adding and subtracting textures, plant life and objects to create hyperreal scenes of dilapidated yet beautiful locales. Hess takes the viewer on a journey to remote and often inaccessible, crumbling spaces in flux. The delineation between indoor and outdoor spaces become ambiguous and disorienting, interrupted by decaying structures, colorful graffiti and natural interjection.

Imbued with the acknowledgment that each subject is ephemeral and shifting, Hess presents graffiti laced landscapes as “unconventional museums showcasing dense collections of street art and graffiti” akin to eighteenth and nineteenth century salon and gallery paintings. The inclusion of the artist’s “anonymous collaborators”, be it nature, architecture or graffiti writers, preserves and reveres the chaotic.