VSF is pleased to present Solastalgia, a two-person exhibition featuring the work of Jessie Homer French (b. 1940, New York, NY) and Minga Opazo (b. 1992, Santiago, Chile), both of whom live and work in Ojai, California. Solastalgia is a term that describes the psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change—particularly shifts brought on by human activity such as climate change, deforestation, and industrialization. Homer French and Opazo address this collective unease through distinct yet interconnected practices.
Jessie Homer French chronicles the ecological and existential conditions of the American West with a stylized clarity and formal restraint. Over the course of several decades, she has cultivated a practice that is at once personal and mythic, mapping the contours of a landscape shaped by fire, death, and quiet resilience. Her saturated palettes and meticulous surfaces create a studied stillness that belies the urgency of her subject matter—wildfires, cemeteries, environmental collapse—rendered not as spectacle, but as lived, recurring realities. In the context of California’s increasingly volatile climate, her long-standing engagement with fire and drought takes on a renewed urgency, not as a reaction to crisis, but as a sustained meditation on its inevitability. Her paintings offer more than aesthetic contemplation—they extend an ethical invitation to slow down and consider what it means to live in a world on the brink of disappearance.
In Texas Panhandle Fires (2024) and Fleeing Tarpon (2024), Homer French renders environmental catastrophe with a quiet, almost devotional stillness. A pair of jackrabbits—pink-eared sentinels—pause mid-crossing as wildfires consume the prairie on either side of an empty road, smoke billowing into an apocalyptic sky. Offshore, an oil platform burns as silver tarpon glides calmly beneath the surface.
