Jessica S. Oler was born and bred in Davis, California. She earned her Master’s in Fine Arts from California College of the Arts in 2019. In addition to her Master’s degree, she has earned her Bachelor’s degree in Sociology from San Francisco State University and three Associates degrees in Social Science, Liberal Arts, and Sociology. Since earning her Master’s she successfully completed the 2019 Visual Art Residency in Chautauqua, New York. In addition to this she has been in art shows in Chautauqua, New York; Alexandria, NSW, Australia; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Albany, Oakland, and San Francisco, California; and Miami, Florida. She also had the honor of being invited to speak at the School of Nursing at UC Davis for a ‘Race and Health’ seminar composed of graduate and medical students where she presented her research surrounding the navigation of disease development alongside her art practice.
Her MFA Award Winning Thesis “Acclimatization: Unprotected Black Female Flesh” continues to be a platform for the formulation of her artistic and research endeavors. By viewing the body as a landscape that tracks and catalogs herstories/histories, she is guided by the girth of her relationship with her body post-diagnosis of multiple sclerosis; landscape; time; Black Geography; and site.
Oler actively supports and participates in advocacy work through the National Multiple Sclerosis Society since her diagnosis of multiple sclerosis in 2012. The onset of said diagnosis continues to fuel her interest in disease development, environmental health, and sustainability.
My present work is involved with space, movement, stagnation, and herstory/history that is generally worked through with video, photography, and/or collage. Seriality and collage are my instincts. A collection of various, specific things. Photographs. Tree bark. Trees. History. My body. Doorways to unknown lands. Skin. Implications of skin. Compositionally sound among the conceptual chaos. I utilize socio-political research and personal narrative as a guiding force to work through larger racial, geographical, and social investigations surrounding Blackness. I’m continuing to work through the concept of “unprotected Black female flesh”, initially born from my lived experience with Multiple Sclerosis thus far. With “unprotected Black female flesh” as the centerpiece of my thought processes, the various offshoots of engrained, systemic injustices are investigated. My most recent paper on canvas series focuses on Black Geography. This series utilizes collage and social abstraction through my original photography.
