McNeil, Jessie

Lives in Vancouver, BC

Artist Statement

Jessie McNeil’s interdisciplinary practice reflects on themes of place, memory, the quotidian, time and migration. Based on her street photography, McNeil’s meticulous collage work exposes the places where the personal and public, the fragmented and integrated merge while offering a painterly representation of the light and texture found in our urban environments. Since the pandemic and the birth of her daughter in 2020, McNeil has been studying the built and invisible boundaries in urban space. With her work most recently, she meditates on how these boundaries may intensify feelings of frustration, isolation and loneliness while caregiving, and how these boundaries are often entirely ignored by children. For McNeil, the medium of collage reflects the transience of her subject matter, for while our daily ballets in the streets and “living rooms” of the city are often as ubiquitous and consistent as the production and consumption of mass media (printed or digital), they are also precious, fleeting and perhaps, in many ways, miraculous. These seemingly mundane encounters in public space are captured for a moment longer when frozen into her collages.