Jesse Mockrin, an American painter, opens her first solo exhibition, Echo, at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), urging people’s attention to gender inequalities and violence through European art history.
According to the AGO exhibition catalogue, Echo is the result of Mockrin’s close study of AGO’s historic European art collection. She then creates a large-scale multi-panelled painting zoom and crop heroine, intended to push their stories out of the past into the present.
Mockrin did an interview in February 2025 with Adam Harris Levine for the AGO exhibition catalogue, talking deeper about her artwork.
Through their catalogue interview, Levine called Mockrin’s work an “extremely self-aware painting.”
“I think that comes out of a modern condition of approaching things from a critical perspective,” Mockrin said to Levine in the AGO catalogue interview.
Jan Wong and Lori Scopis, exhibition visitors, said this is the first time they have heard about Mockrin. As someone who loves to analyze, Mockrin’s artwork caught their attention.
“It takes a while to figure out the relationships of her art to the source, so we want to try and figure this out,” Scopis said.
Both Wong and Scopis agree that The Descent by Mockrin is their favourite artwork.
“She has a theme. It’s all about women and violence,” Wong said as she looked at the painting, The Descent, in front of her.
The Descent by Mockrin is based on the historical story about the Sabine women.
In an interview with Levine for the exhibition catalogue in February 2025, Mockrin feels that the “historical works about the Rape of the Sabine seem to celebrate the strength and action of men.”
“I hope my version tells the story of the women as the main character,” Mockrin said in an interview with Levine.
In the AGO catalogue interview with Levine, Mockrin said that “it feels like she’s working with complicated subjects, which are about the violation of women or the abuse of power.”
She also said in the interview that “acting as if they’re [women] flawless representation of the real world doesn’t feel right to her.
“They feel like they have to let you know that they are aware of all their problematic issues,” Mockrin said in the interview with Levine.
In the exhibition catalogue, it says that she uses familiar female biblical and mythological characters, like Mary Magdalene, the redeemed prostitute, and Jewish Matriarch Rachel, who dies in childbirth, to create new focus and make them the protagonists of their own stories, according to the catalogue.
It shows in the catalogue that Mockrin is aware of her standpoint in society. She reads and paints ancient stories and myths through her lens as an artist.
Through her art, Mockrin led people’s attention to important parts of the story that were rarely exhibited in museums before.
