2014

Jeppa Hall

Jeppa Hall as Monster Jerry in a Queen Shmooquan performance.

Jeppa challenges the limits of creative discourse, connects community, facilitates excitement, and generally shakes things up. Her creative practice is a life practice and her ecstatic gestures deliver on the promise of art’s ability to conduct and disturb. She is just the kind of person Su Job envisioned when she created and endowed this award for Seattle artists with a connection to Pioneer Square.

Jeppa’s hybridized practice is difficult to describe or even categorize. Rooted in the healing power of laughter and ritual, she challenges consumerist propaganda and institutionalized power structures. Pop culture iconography, imagery of women in mass media, and objects associated with male dominance help her expose political, corporate and media abuses and their direct relationship to gender inequality, self-hatred, denatured food, and more. Her unusual storytelling, layered metaphors, and amalgamation of the collective American consciousness with the unknown and cosmic, results in engaging psychedelic performances that encourage dialogue and expand perceptions of time and space.

Through her alter ego Queen Shmooquan, an everyday hero within whom lies a super-real modern day oracle, Jeppa tests the limits of contemporary performance art as well as political and social satire. Her other solo and collaborative projects include the 21st century story ballads of Goatgirl, the acoustic doom metal duo Finger with Julie Baldridge, the performance duo Pip-N-Top, Seattle Harmonic Voices under the direction of Stephen Fandrich, and the guerilla street art team, The Gallbladders.

~Jordan Howland

Visit Jeppa's website.