Jessica Rankin at Salon 94

Arrived at Salon 94’s Freeman’s Alley gallery for the opening of Jessica Rankin’s new show entitled “Dear Another”.Rankin has a deep infatuation with the written word. Her past body of work consisted of heavily text-based embroideries. In this new series the text is used more sparingly, sprinkled amongst the blue and black constellations in her cosmic watercolors. Although, seemingly randomly placed, the words read like poetry. Starting from different areas of the cosmic map the viewer can create their own poem different from the next, which lends to the overall idea of infinite cosmic expansion.For this new series, she collaborated with poet Brenda Shaughnessey to gather writers to reflect on the paintings. A reading of the poems was performed last night at the opening.I left the show thinking it evoked a feeling similar to that of the work of Joseph Cornell, I mentioned this to the artist who revealed that he heavily influenced her work early in her career.Off to the dinner...