ARTIST OVERVIEW

Jess (1923–2004) was born Burgess Collins in Long Beach, California. Jess spent his early adulthood studying science at the California Institute of Technology before being drafted into the army to work on the Manhattan Project during the war years. At age 25, he experienced "the dream," an intense vision of nuclear annihilation in the year 1975, which prompted him to quit his job and devote himself entirely to art. Moving to San Francisco during the heyday of the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), Jess studied with artists such as Clyfford Still, Ad Reinhardt, Elmer Bischoff, and David Park. Although he began his career as a non-objective painter, Jess was never one for pure abstraction, seeing "stories" in the craggy, interlocking hachure of the arch-abstractionist Clyfford Still. Jess's contact with the poet Robert Duncan, his partner in life and collaborator in art, reinforced his narrative and literary tendencies. In the early 1950s, Duncan purchased Max Ernst's Surrealist collage-book Une semaine de bonté as a birthday present from Duncan. The precision of Ernst's method for cut-out collage and assemblage and the work's ultimate resistance to a singular narrative held a particular appeal for Jess, whose later Paste-ups would also mine imagery from Victorian photogravures, albeit in a more densely-packed, textured way. Allusive titling and the use of text fragments, often informed by Duncan, would figure prominently in the Paste-ups, never to define a specific narrative, but rather to inject uncertainty, a sense of the unfamiliar, as well as Jess's sly sense of humor into the work. In 1959, Jess began a new series of works, the Translations, in which photographs and engravings served as the initial motifs for larger-scale paintings undertaken by the artist-raw source material no longer merely arranged, but transformed through his sensibility.

 
In the 1970s Jess undertook a new and increasingly ambitious series of Paste-ups, in which jigsaw puzzle pieces, taken from any number of completely different puzzles, were carefully and meticulously fit together to create a single, layered image. Similar in spirit to his previous Paste-ups, Jess's jigsaw pieces hinged upon the surprising, defamiliarizing, and allusive juxtapositions of disparate images for their visual and psychological effect. The introduction of individual puzzle pieces to the vocabulary of collage brought a new sense of play to the Paste-up, both in its embrace of the arbitrary and, literally, in the repurposing of the elements of a children's game. Nostalgia, and the recuperation of imagery from the not-too-distant past inform all aspects of Jess's art. Art, for Jess, was an act of creative transformation-the overlooked, historically forgotten image is recycled, repurposed, and recomposed in the service of a dream-like and poetic defamiliarization. Jess spent his life cloistered with his art, living with the poet Duncan in a dilapidated Victorian house in San Francisco, surrounded by neatly organized files of magazine clippings, old books, advertising art, and myriad other printed sources which were the foundation of his work. He died in San Francisco at age 80 in 2004.