DVAA Member since 2024
Vessna Scheff
2025 DVAA RESIDENT
WEBsite: vessnascheff.com
INSTAGRAM: @vessnascheff
About:
Disrupting divides between visual and performing arts with a Masters from the Rhode Island School of Design ’22, Vessna Scheff is a San Francisco Bay Area raised multi-hyphenate artist who breathes visuals into vocal runs for immersive performances, installations, watercolors and recordings. Her recent artworks have seen Vessna exploring the relationships between watercolors, texture and sound, culminating in a series of visual collections and a debut album to be released October 18th, 2024. Her work has found home in public and private collections across the U.S. and internationally, and developed through time as an Artist-in-Residence with Pratt>FORWARD, Mass MoCA, Glen Foerd, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, alongside teaching at Penland School of Craft and Brown University.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
My name is Vessna Scheff, and I am a producer of marks and sounds. Through music and watercolors, I tell stories of incredible resourcefulness, strategy, technique, beauty, community, liberation, and love. Celebrating the unsung histories- personally and socially- is at the core of my family story and artistic practice. My work plays with intervals and conversations; in relationships of mark to mark, note to note, tone to texture, breath to brush, and color to sound. Leaning into language often used to describe both watercolors and Black living, words such as “difficult” and “uncontrollable”, I position the fluid nature in my work as an embrace of full internal liberation. The central use of movement in my practice pushes against the desire to control, and instead positions us to appreciate the glorious sensations of liberation- the swell, the pour; the beat, the splash; the hit, the mark; the tone, the texture—even if they are just for us, and for just a moment. These moments, we hold forever.
