Jessie Makinson,
Your door is knocking
Jessie Makinson combines her skills in drawing and painting to build ecofeminist worlds in which human and non-human live in a contestant state of renegotiation. Makinson’s worlds are filled with objects abandoning their tasks and characters at once mysterious and familiar caught at a moment of tantrum. Her visual methodology is vast and ranges from contemporary science fiction to 17th and 18th-century erotica, pre-agricultural mythology, early Renaissance altarpieces, British folklore, and Flemish kitchen scenes. Plucking themes and narratives from British pop culture and mixing them, intentionally, with recognizable American motifs, she creates bold new contexts for both. Vivid colors describe tense, erotic scenes in which desirous characters are dangerous active participants, not passive permission givers. Makinson’s characters practice rituals, they embrace, plot, and conspire. They hold sexual power and disrupt expectations, inhabiting a universe that surprises, delights, and tests its audience.
Jessie Makinson
Your door is knocking, 2024
Oil on canvas
79 x 130 inches, 200.7 x 330.2 cm
This painting explores the liminal space between dreams and wakefulness. The title suggests an inversion – not someone knocking at your door, but the door itself performing the action, creating an immediate sense of the uncanny.
Drawing inspiration from the dark folklore of eternal dances (the fairy realm) and Hans Christian Andersen's "The Red Shoes," the work features a log-like figure with deliberately severed feet, symbolizing entrapment in a realm between states. This imagery evokes the feeling of being suspended in a dream state until disrupted by external reality.
Jessie Makinson, Your door is knocking (Detail View)
French Art Nouveau fashion elements blend with séance imagery to create a deceptive festivity. Maps suggest plotting or navigation through this uncertain territory. Despite its superficial celebratory atmosphere, the composition cultivates a deliberate undercurrent of disquiet – a party where something is not quite right.
The work invites viewers to consider the boundaries between consciousness states and the disorienting experience of being pulled between worlds.
Jessie Makinson, Your door is knocking (Detail View)
Jessie Makinson lives and works in London. Makinson’s work is in the collections of the British Museum, London; Long Museum, Shanghai; Hessel Museum, New York; and X Museum, Beijing. She has had solo exhibitions at Lyles & King, New York, US; Francois Ghebaly, Los Angeles, US; Galería OMR, Mexico City, MX; among others. Her work has been exhibited in group exhibitions including British Art Now, Telegraph Foundation, Olomouc, CR; The Descendants, K11 MUSEA, Hong Kong, CN; Machines of Desire, Simon Lee Gallery, London, UK & Hong Kong; Drawing Attention: Emerging British Artists, British Museum, London, UK; Der abscheuliche kuss, Kunstverein Dresden, Dresden, DE; Dancing in Dark Times, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London, UK; I See You, Victoria Miro Gallery, London, UK; No Patience for Monuments, Perrotin, Seoul, KR; In the Company Of, curated by Katy Hessel, TJ Boulting, London, UK; Formal Encounters, Nicodim Gallery, Bucharest, RO; among others. Makinson is represented by Lyles & King, New York and Francois Ghebaly, Los Angeles.