April 11 – May 2
Main Gallery
Jessica Driver (b.1987 Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand) is a contemporary painter splitting her time between the beachside town of Oakura, in New Zealand, and Melbourne. She holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts from Unitec, and a Masters in Fine Arts from Elam.
Working in oils, Driver’s practice is centred on the human figure, specifically the face, and what it reveals when pushed toward the edge of recognition. Her source images are gathered from various places: some photographs of real people, while others are generated entirely by artificial intelligence. She layers, smears and dissolves these likenesses until the boundary between person and paint, between real and rendered, becomes genuinely uncertain. The resulting portraits are not quite abstractions and not quite representations, they occupy the uneasy space between the two.
Through a distinctive figurative language, Driver creates works where identity appears to drift, dissolve or resist. Faces are caught somewhere between presence and erasure, while bodies insist on warmth and contact even as the world around them fragments. These gestures – the gathering, the holding, the reaching – become metaphors for something larger: the struggle to remain present and connected in an age that pulls relentlessly toward the digital and the disembodied.
Becoming a mother has sharpened this preoccupation, turning questions about technology, isolation and the erosion of truth into something deeply personal: a reckoning with the world being built for the next generation.
Jessica currently has works in the Wallace Arts Trust.
In We Are Still Here, Jess turns to oil paint and canvas to ask what it means to be present in an age of accelerating unreality. Working from source images gathered online, some photographs of real people, others generated entirely by artificial intelligence, she confronts a question with no clean answer: how do we know the difference anymore? The faces in these works are knowingly blurred, smeared across the picture plane as if caught mid-dissolve. Identity does not vanish all at once. It drifts slowly.
We live in a world that insists it is more connected than ever. And yet at the centre of it all, something is dissolving. We have more information than any generation before us, but less certainty about what is true.
The urgency behind these paintings is not merely philosophical. The machines driving our new world require vast, hidden sacrifice: rivers rerouted to cool data centres, mountains stripped for silver and rare earth, ecosystems traded quietly for processing power. The human cost is subtler but no less real. Screens proliferate and attention fragments. A generation trades the physical world, piece by piece, for a digital one. We speak of a mental health crisis in terms of numbers and policies, but Jess paints it as a felt experience, the deliberate, slow blurring of the self, the face that no longer quite resolves.
And yet the body persists. Throughout these works, figures stand, gather, hold one another. The flesh is warm, the paint is generous. There is grief here, but also tenderness, a refusal to mourn what has not yet been lost. These are portraits of people who are still here, still reaching, even as the world they inhabit flickers at the edges.
These works ask you to slow down and look, not at a screen, but at paint, at canvas, at the insistent fact of a human hand at work. To stand in front of them is to practise something quietly radical: being present. The faces may blue, the signals may fade, but the body does not forget itself. We are still here. We remain.
