Jody Servon

“The idea always comes first,” reflects Jody Servon, who considers herself an installation artist rather than media specific artist. She received her MFA in New Genre from the University of Arizona.  After a lifetime of collecting found materials for her work, there’s one thing she’s pretty sure of: her packing and shipping days are over.  She’s become much more interested in what other people collect than in collecting it herself. 

Jody, whose residency was sponsored by the North Carolina Arts Council, worked this summer with a new media, old house paint, from basements or mis-tints on the hardware shelf.  She doesn’t mix any of these colors but likes to use them as found objects. 

But house paint? you might ask.  “I’m finding it gorgeous,” she said.  Jody loves visual histories, even the old colors along her studio apartment’s windowsill.  Her concept with these colors is to eventually paint them on the walls of her Philadelphia gallery while importing the story of their previous owner and place: “Maggie’s bedroom, Smiths’ basement.”

 “If I can tweak an ordinary experience or thing, maybe I can get [the viewers] to consider what’s artful in their daily lives,” said Jody.  Though she wants viewers to have a surface experience of her work—to be expected with public art—Jody is particularly interested in how to reveal the layers and intimacies of the project, and how to incorporate the prior meaning of her materials as yet another layer of the work itself.

Her VSC studio was a rare opportunity to have a big white space, and she used every inch as a testing ground for her next projects.  “It’s been really generous here,” she said.  “I don’t feel like I have to apologize for painting on the walls… Here, I’m just an artist.”

photo courtesy of Howard Romero