JESSE DORTZBACH is an artist, educator, writer, and builder residing in Baltimore MD.  He grew up in Nairobi, Kenya as the son of missionary parents spending his early years in his father’s wood shop, traveling the east African wilderness, camping out with and chasing game animals, playing soccer in the streets of Nairobi slums, and living with the locals.  He earned a BA in Community Art from Wheaton College in 2002, an M.Ed in Art Education from the University of Minnesota in 2004, studied architecture at Morgan State University, and is currently earning his Masters in Social Work at the University of Maryland. He has been teaching drawing, painting, sculpture, and photography in Baltimore County Public Schools for the past 20 years, sharing his passion for art as a contextual starting point for conversations about living a purposeful and curious life.

MY ARTWORK confronts questions about the existential purpose of life: hope, loss, control, efficiency, violence, loneliness, spiritual longing, introspection, quietude, architecture, and anthropology.

My sculptures are an exploration of the transient nature of life, of spiritual longing and skepticism, of hope and loss.  In the wake of our death the objects we manufactured far outlast our own material existence and remain as deteriorating totems of how we sought meaning in our lives and how we defined ourselves by them.  By using decayed building materials, structural relics, and found and cast objects, my work attempts to underscore the tensions between human fragility and notions of an eternal afterlife.  Referencing biblical stories, parables, teachings, and venerated doctrines, I present my own agnostic struggle to find resolution in the unanswered (and unanswerable) questions about the dichotomy of rational thinking and mystical belief.  This body of work is my quest for reasons of being despite my unresolved skepticism of the answers I have known.My paintings, drawings, and sculptures are an introspective exploration of common fears, desires, and hopes implicit within human experience. His work juxtaposes the transient and fragile nature of human life with objects of power that can be used for creative and destructive purposes alike: objects such as power tools, war machines, construction vehicles, and weaponry.

My photographic series are an investigation of how every day moments embody the human curiosity of what defines our purpose in existence. My photographs are a documentary collective of introspective and reactionary moments that occur when humans encounter each other and their environment.