This interview is published in collaboration with Glass Breakfast. Glass Breakfast is an ongoing, online archive project serving as an alternative space for the appreciation and conversation of art.
Minneapolis-based painter and muralist Jess Zottola is heavily influenced by the people and location she is around/in. Often concerned with process, motion and shape, her work ranges from one-off compositions that deal specifically with her experiences in a certain time and place to large-scale murals that respond directly to the spaces they come to inhabit.
Below, Ian Carstens interviews Zottola, discussing her use of found materials and the histories they carry, how she doesn’t need her expressive work to be seen as “art” to be meaningful, and honoring her own wild parts by letting them out in her creative practice.
Support for this video was provided by The National Endowment for the Arts and the Iowa Arts Council, which exists within the Iowa Economic Development Authority. Glass Breakfast is a fiscally sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts.
About the author: Ian Carstens (he/him) is a filmmaker, writer and curator from the occupied land of the Otoe-Missouria, Sioux, Ioway, Sauk and Fox, known also as the Mississippi River Basin. His work explores temporality, non-human aliveness, multiplicity, as well as critiques of the archive, lens-based art forms and cultural institutions. He received his BA in Art Theory and Criticism from Luther College and teaches filmmaking at DMACC.
Carstens is the lead curator/filmmaker of Glass Breakfast, an ongoing archival project. His work has been exhibited with the Chicago Architecture Biennial, the MSU Broad Art Museum, various festivals and on public television. His arts writing has been published with The Oxford American, Burnaway, Sugarcane, The Pulp, Ruckus Journal, Fugue Literary Journal, Sixty Inches From Center and others. He is the recipient of grants from the Columbus Museum of Art & Design, the Columbus Area Arts Council, Bloomington Arts Commission, and Iowa Arts Council, as well as being selected participant of the 2023 Tanda program with Chuquimarca.
