JESSIE ROSE VALA
THE POLLINATORS

PRIVATE PRICE LIST

OPENING RECEPTION
FRIDAY, MARCH 6, 2026
5-8 PM

ON VIEW
MARCH 6 - APRIL 4, 2026

FOR INQUIRES
Please contact hello@chefasprojects.com

Chefas Projects is delighted to present The Pollinators, an immersive sculptural installation by Jessie Rose Vala that renders the relationality of our planetary existence. Through ceramic, neon, and mixed media forms, Vala conjures a world where boundaries between human, animal, vegetal, and mineral dissolve into radiant interconnection.

At the center of the exhibition are four monumental stoneware sculptures arranged in pairs and connected through neon tubes glowing with the chromatic presence of noble gases. These hybrid beings, female faces with elongated ears, emerge as emissaries of interspecies entanglement. They reference endangered pollinators and plants, including the Ghost Orchid, the Sphinx moth, the Greater long-nosed bat, and the Bois Dentelle. Each form is enmeshed within a lithic, stone-like body, suggesting beings shaped by deep time, adaptation, and mutual dependence.

Surrounding the central sculptures are ceramic wall plaques inspired by familiar garden flowers, species cultivated, transported, modified, and dispersed through human industry. Created in highly metallic glazes, these surfaces evoke the ancient symbiosis between plants and minerals. The works trace a material lineage: from stone to soil, from soil to root, from root to bloom, and from bloom into our bodies. Plants act as conduits, carrying the mineral memory of the earth into living systems, binding us to what Vala calls our “dreaming rocky planet.”

“...no human/world duality exists. It takes work to create and enforce such bifurcation, a division that obscures but cannot efface the irreducible hybridity and expansive intermeshing through which action unfolds.” ”

— Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

Jessie Rose Vala (b. 1977) works in sculptural ceramics, mixed media, and installation, creating immersive environments that function as speculative mythologies. Through object-making and time-based projects, Vala constructs counter-narratives that explore ecological transformation, interspecies entanglement, and the porous boundaries between the archaic and the futuristic. Her practice engages myth-making not as nostalgia, but as a generative tool for imagining alternate cosmologies and resilient futures.

Working with materials such as stoneware, glass, brass, and neon, Vala builds chimeric worlds populated by hybrid animal, vegetal, and human forms. These figures often appear as relics or emissaries, artifacts from parallel ecologies where survival depends on adaptation and symbiosis. By combining traditional craft processes with industrial and luminous materials, she creates sculptural translations that feel both ancient and emergent, foregrounding tensions between permanence and ephemerality.

Vala has exhibited at Truck Gallery, Evergold Gallery, Present Company, and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. She has received grants and support from the Oregon Arts Commission, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), and The Ford Family Foundation.

In addition to her studio practice, Vala curates and collaborates with a diverse community of artists. She is Career Faculty at the University of Oregon and a member of Well Well Projects in Portland, Oregon.

ARTWORK

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