Jessica Voorsanger
| Jessica Voorsanger | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1965 New York |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Rhode Island School of Design, Goldsmiths College |
| Known for | Painting, performance art, installations |
| Movement | Contemporary Art |
| Spouse(s) | Patrick Brill, best known as Bob and Roberta Smith |
| Website | digitalgrapevine |
Jessica Voorsanger (born 1965) is an American artist and academic, living and working in London. She has worked on the "Mystery Train" project for the Institute of Contemporary Arts to make contemporary art more accessible to people with learning disabilities. Her work has been exhibited more than two dozen times with her husband, fellow artist Patrick Brill, best known as Bob and Roberta Smith.
Jessica Voorsanger was born in New York City in 1965 and grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Two of her grandparents were artists: her father's mother and her mother's father.
She first studied fine art at The Brooklyn Museum Art School in New York from 1982 to 1983 and obtained her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Rhode Island School of Design in 1987. She began graduate studies at Goldsmiths College, London in 1991 and received her Master of Arts in fine art in 1993.
She met Patrick Brill (the artist Bob and Roberta Smith) after graduating from Rhode Island School of Design. When he returned to London, she went with him and they are now married.
Voorsanger creates inter-active installations, objects, performances and events that reference pop and celebrity culture. As a child growing up in the 1970s she was enamored with popular sitcom television shows like The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family, and, as one critic has reported, she believes her interest in the shows planted "the seeds of star adulation" that has influenced her work; and "that these cosy shows were a social glue, offering comfort to a nation traumatised by the Vietnam war and bankruptcy." Her artwork explores stardom, television shows, and fame using a wide range of media, including filmed performances, paintings and sculptures. Journalist Jessica lacks said, "Her brand of celebrity-quick art has occasionally been dismissed as lightweight, with critics overlooking or ignoring the fact that Voorsanger's guileful ability to make work that is as addictive and kitsch as Heat magazine, operates on the same plain as the world she is critiquing."
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