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Artist Talk Series - Sarah Gonzales Busse and Jenna Tessler: Art as Statement

  • SJIMA 540 Spring Street Friday Harbor, WA, 98250 United States (map)

The 2023 Artist Talk Series is presented in collaboration with the San Juan Islands Museum of Art, as part of Alchemy’s Artists in Community Program. Join us for this free event in person in the upstairs room at the SJIMA, or via zoom using the information below.

Join Zoom Meeting:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83171339245

Meeting ID: 831 7133 9245


Sarah Gonzales Busse, based in San Antonio, TX, works in print and natural dyed textile focusing on individuals as signifiers and paradoxes within the human condition. She is drawn specifically to how individuals and groups inhabit intergenerational histories, cosmology patterns, sacred geometry, and cultural geographies. Her work often features women and children as primary messengers and receivers within natural, domestic, spare or abstracted landscapes.

Her materials and approaches have ranged from painting, drawing, and sculpture, to more recently working with natural dyes and traditional methods on paper, print, and textile works, as she reacts to being an artist and mother in these times of evolving cultural narratives, performative digital living, and really dire global climate and economic uncertainties.

Jenna Tessler (She/They) is an artist working through her ideas in the mediums of photography, mixed media, and writing. Her art practice is influenced by her minor in expressive art therapy that emphasizes process over attaining a final product. Through artmaking, she aims to bear witness to and further process her own experiences, especially ones that feel untouchable, difficult, or traumatic. The work that she will be sharing centers around the neurodivergence in her family and the relationship she has to her brother. She self-identifies as a “Glass child,” a term used to refer to the sibling of someone with a disability.

Jenna earned her BFA in Photography in 2021 from Lesley’s School of Art & Design (formerly Art Institute of Boston, MA). She has spent the last couple years exploring some of what the arts world has to offer. Notably, she has assisted at the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops, New Mexico, Headlands Center for the Arts, Marin Headlands, CA and the Photo Center Northwest, Seattle, WA.