Jeff Wallace is a multidisciplinary artist working between New York City and Lecce, Italy. His work explores time, memory, and the ways materials carry traces of personal history. An experience in 2012 changed the way Wallace thought about objects and memory. While sorting through the belongings of elderly relatives, he discovered personal histories preserved in correspondence, photographs, books, and everyday objects. He began to consider what survives, what disappears, and the stories we reconstruct from what remains.

For more than a decade, discarded books have been central to his work. Through a process he considers a form of literary archaeology, Wallace transforms their cloth covers, pages, and printed fragments into paintings, works on paper, photographs, and large-scale installations. Using pigmented, hand-pressed paper pulp, he creates portraits, landscapes, and scenes of everyday life. Faded colors, inscriptions, and traces of handling often remain part of the work, allowing materials to carry meaning beyond their original purpose.

Across mediums, accumulation and repetition inform his exploration of personal relationships, shared experiences, and the relationship between individual and collective memory. More recently, his practice has expanded into ceramics, drawing on familiar objects and utilitarian forms encountered in southern Italy.

Wallace holds a BFA from Purchase College and attended the Yale Design Program in Brissago, Switzerland. Before pursuing fine art full-time, he led a branding and communications studio for nearly three decades. His work has been exhibited at Jane Lombard Gallery, Columbia University's Butler Library, Craven Contemporary, Cristin Tierney Gallery, and Rick Wester Fine Arts. He has participated in residencies at Yaddo, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and the American Academy in Rome. He is also curator of Main Window, a public art presentation space in DUMBO, Brooklyn.

For more information, please contact jeff@jeffwallacenyc.com.

Jeff Wallace | STUDIO
405 Van Brunt Street
Brooklyn, NY 11231