The Orlando Museum of Art is showing work by Jessy Nite, who creates sculptural, shadow and fiber art to explore layered concepts of meaning and communication through text-based art in shared spaces. Her installations use simple yet enigmatic words and phrases, designed in her own hand, that invite dialogue and evoke memories. The interplay of light and shadow that illuminates, elongates or erases the text serves as a metaphor for how perception and meaning-making shift in the viewer's mind.
Working with manufactured materials that resist decay, such as treated metal and paracord, Nite asks viewers to consider survival, resilience and preservation across natural, social, art-historical and prehistoric worlds. Entering her gallery, the viewer is immersed in a luminous environment echoing the soft light of sunrise, an apricot hue that evokes notions of intimacy and the body. Those concepts become tangible in the phrase Beneath Your Light, My Paradise (2021), which floats onto the walls in a customized dropped shadow, while REMEMBER ME (2018) develops under the harsh sun outdoors. The emotive effect, legibility and visibility of her expressions are tied to the movement of light and the passage of time.
Suspended in the center of the gallery is Nite's monumental sculpture Lands End (2026), described as an experimental vessel and the artist's most recent translation of her paracord textiles. She integrates traditional and utilitarian woven basketry methods with her own knotting techniques, transitioning the strands from a dense apricot weave at the mouth to an irregular, unraveling netted pattern in green, then purple toward the base, placing the basketry and its title at the edge of a landscape like Miami, where the water is ever rising. Three of Nite's large textiles are also integrated throughout the museum, each featuring an aspirational word. Retreat uses an energetic green cord and two types of knots; Endure (2023) signals resilience and resistance, and Siempre (2023), meaning Always, suggests preservation and continuity.
Press release issued by Orlando Museum of Art:
https://omart.org/news/the-ties-that-bind/
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