Multidisciplinary artist Jessy Nite specializes in interactive, experiential and site-specific installations, recently exploring typography through paracord, a lightweight nylon rope. Through a process of intricate knotting, and layered text, Nite provides audiences the freedom to interact and interpret her visuals for themselves. TSA joins Nite in her Miami, FL studio for a conversation on math, messaging and universal truths.
(excerpt from audio interview)
On developing a relationship with textiles
I came to textiles the way that I’ve come to a lot of the work that I do. I’ve always worked across a lot of different disciplines, but starting with the survival knots, there was almost a whole year where I was just messing around and it had nothing to do with my “serious” work. I’m always looking for outlets to do things that are fun and make things that don’t have to do with my gallery work, just as an outlet. That’s always how it starts, fooling myself into thinking this is just going to be for fun. After a year of making keychains and planters and and belts and all kinds of random things, I was really teaching myself the knots. One of my friends was like, okay, when are you going to start making these into letters? Because typography is really the through line through all of my work.
On building text into textiles
I make all my own fonts. I don’t use anything that’s pre-made. I love the utilitarian aspects of communication and signage and how ubiquitous these messages are. We see it everywhere in every culture; signs exist. Without even realizing it, as I started really working through my career as an artist, typography was the center of everything. So [when] my friend asked about turning the knots into text, I had just started Hold Tight, and it was the very first piece I had made out of text.
On meaning in the material
The text for the work is informed by the material itself, so it’s all very layered in meaning. A lot of it has to do with the idea of survival, and not just survival in nature, but also survival in society. A lot of it also has to do with like love and relationships and being at the end of the world.
Paracord is a super tough material; it’s UV proof, it doesn’t break down, you can use it outdoors. That’s why they use it in the army. It was a swirling marriage of all these things that fueled a love the medium. I don’t ever remember working in a medium before that I got so excited about. I have no background in textiles so it’s all very new to me. When I was growing up, I used to sew a lot. I used to make a lot of clothes. But this is something completely different. There’s no sewing in any of the work but there are many different knots, and different works involve a completely different series of knots. This particular one, “Retreat” has two different knots, and some combine a even more than that. Some are just one style, like the piece “Siempre” that you saw at the show. One [will involve] plotting everything out while another will be very freeform. It’s been so fun to just continue to explore all of these different ways of creating letter structure; creating messaging.
On process
It’s very intentional. It’s very meditative…I have this borderline issue where I cannot make work that is not incredibly tedious. As I said, I make all of my own fonts so there’s a whole long process. [Points to a series of diagrams] These are all different patterns for one giant piece…nine by 15 feet. It’s absolutely huge and took months to complete. I had an assistant help me but even then, they made maybe one 20th of the piece while I was just knotting away day and night. Also, there’s mathematical formulas I’ve had to devise. If I’m doing this type of knot, you can see that’s one of the formulas. It takes up this much cord, so you start with four feet of cord. Once it’s totally knotted, it’s 38 knots and it takes up this much space when it’s knotted. That’s the only way I can really figure out how to do these giant pieces.
On living and working in Miami, Florida
My first few years living in Miami, I was living on South Beach. I had moved from New York and was kind of caught by the glitz and the glamour and the nightlife and how rich everybody was. I moved here during like the Great Recession and would have never known it. But then you spend more time here and just like in any natural space, but particularly here, you cannot exist without constantly being reminded about climate change being real. We’re such a unique ecology that you’re face to face every single day with sea level rise, with habitat destruction, with overzealous developers, [and] natural resource depletion. It is pretty astounding and I think most people who live in a coastal area will feel that to some extent, but it really feels like a huge part of living in Miami. Many of the artists here were obviously inspired by that, because that’s what we’re living in. So especially right now, it’s a common theme in a lot of the work that that people are making.
I also think that [in reference to] being on the margins, we’re really far from other big cities. What has always kept me in Miami is my ability to actually carve out my own place. You know, I can own a home now…Miami has been very good to me. The quality of life is pretty great as far as living here as an artist. I have my own studio now; I never thought that was going to be a possibility. So, there is a lot of ways to think about [being on] the margins, even the diversity of the communities that exist here. Granted, it’s not like a lot of diversity on like a larger [global] scale, but as far as Latin America, Central America, South America, the Caribbean, we have a wide variety of different people from everywhere.
I also think [that] a lot of the Caribbean and Latin cultures, too, have a certain reverence for the outdoors. You know, one of the reasons why I’ve always wanted to live in this neighborhood [of Little Haiti] is like to have fruit trees. It’s always been like this very lush environment and you’ve always seen the little grandmas walking around the neighborhood collecting plants…they know exactly where to get it and they know where this grows. There’s this own little economy of like people trading. You can come into my yard and grab this or that whenever you want. You know, I’m trying to teach my neighbor’s kids how to pick the sapodillas from the tree. They’ve never even eaten them and that tree, it’s got to be at least 40 years old.
On building connection through text
A lot of the messaging from the textile works that I’m doing…all of the phrases that I use, they play off of human truths; things about relationships, whether it’s friendships, communities, lovers, and also the environment. I think that that’s what’s so fun and why I love language so much. Text is accessible. For people who don’t know anything about art, there’s no barrier to them reading a lot of the work that I do.
I’ve always dreamed of making the type of work that doesn’t just hang in a gallery. I want everybody to be able to see it and I want everybody to be able to relate no matter what their experience. There’s human truths that we all share. I have a piece that says “HIGH HOPES” on 71st Street here in Little Haiti. It was one of my first public shadow pieces and I literally just was so tired of nobody understanding the concept of those pieces in a public setting. I had been doing them for years. Finally, I was like, I’m putting this up. I knew the guy who owned the building…at that time, Little Haiti still hadn’t been sold over to like the big developments. It was really just like a few of us artists and a very concentrated amount of warehouses.
Little Haiti was really functioning as it always had been, but the idea of having high hopes, it applied to so many different things; anybody can understand that. It can mean anything to anyone…there’s the hopes of just getting by. Especially in a low-income neighborhood, people are just trying to survive. Then there’s high hopes of also thriving in these spaces, the high hopes of the artists who are trying to make it, of the little grandma pulling her cart down the street to like wait at the bus stop. That’s right next to the piece. You know, I love the idea of people seeing that piece there.
JESSY NITE b. 1985, Montclair, NJ. Most recently, her work as been featured in solo presentations with the Arsht Center Miami, FL (2022), Miami Beach – No Vacancy, Miami, FL (2022), and Club Gallery, Miami, FL, (2023). Her installation works have been commissioned internationally, most notably by Miami Dade County Art in Public Places (2023), Arts and Culture Miami Beach (2022), Arsht Center (2022), Harborside Jersey City (2021), City of Coral Gables Arts in Public Places (2019), Knight Foundation Public Space Challenge Grant (2019), Asbury Park Boardwalk CRA (2018), Hilger Gallery Vienna (2017) and commissioned by brands like Nike, Facebook/Meta, Redbull, NFL, Ami Paris and Don Julio. Her work has appeared in Hypebeast, Artnet, Designboom, and the Artist Newspaper. Jessy currently lives and works in Miami, FL.
Website http://jessynite.com/
IG @jessynite
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