Seen Sawn, 2025
animation
Slemmons collection
Seen Sawn is an animation using the diffuse and discursive diversions of three-dimensional image histories to complicate, conflict and cross-purpose the ancient, the archival and the anonymous. Or, the rule of threes as a kind of anima, animus, and animal, too.
Stareo, 2025
Custom View-masters with slides
Slemmons collection
Stareo extends the artist—and the audience’s—research into the domestic participatory, the gimmick and the expressive potentials of misused technologies. Custom viewmaster slides and a cinema of one.
JESSE MALMED (he/him, born 1983, Santa Fe, NM) is an artist, curator and educator working in video, performance, text, installation, events, occasional objects, merch, their gaps, overlaps, Chicago and Milwaukee. His works play in sub- and counter-cultural histories, like a joke that’s a poem that’s a song covering itself, a shadow puppet interfering in the broadcast beam, having déjà vu for the first time, or watching a time travel sequence in reverse.
His work has found temporary home in museums, cinemas, galleries, bars and barns, including solo presentations at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Roots and Culture, the DePaul Art Museum, Flatland, the Chicago Cultural Center, D Gallery, Syntax Season, Cinema Contra, Microlights, Echo Park Film Center, Artists’ Television Access, Lease Agreement and the University of Chicago Film Studies Center. His platformist and curatorial projects include the Live to Tape Artist Television Festival, programming at the Nightingale Cinema, instigating Western Pole, the mobile exhibition space and artist bumper sticker project Trunk Show (with Raven Falquez Munsell), programming through ACRE TV and organizing exhibitions, screenings and performance events both independently and institutionally.
His writing has appeared on and in Bad at Sports (where he is a permanent guest host), Wicked Art Assignments, Cine-File, The Quarantine Times, Incite Journal of Experimental Media, The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature, Temporary Art Review, Big Big Wednesday and YA5. Raised in Santa Fe, he earned his BA from Bard College and his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He was named a Breakout Artist by Newcity and has attended residencies at ACRE, Ox-Bow, Summer Forum, the Chicago Cultural Center and Links Hall. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is the lead singer of The Fucs (a Fugs cover band) and was profiled recently in Newcity’s Film 50 and the Chicago Tribune.