About

At the root of Jassie’s interdisciplinary, sound art practice is a deep connection to language, nature, and technology emphasizing perceptual experiences and the site-specificity of the artwork.  Jassie’s work oscillates between states of representation and fragmentation, object and process and incorporates both notation and improvisation. 

The work can take the form of drawing, concrete poetry, DJ sets, experimental performance, instrument design, photography, video, programming, installations and digital works for internet. Recording energy (light, time, motion, sound) with a lens, microphone, and/or stylus— the recordings become a dynamic archive as well as material to build poetic gestures in everyday spaces. Drawing is not limited to a two-dimensional plane, but rather drawing is a record to play, sample, mix and re-mix in space. Mobile recording technologies become philosophical tools to engage with nature and architecture.  Recordings are taken out of context re-played, re-mixed, re-shaped and re-presented anew to explore a visual approach to electronic music and a musical approach to drawing.

CV

Jassie Rios
B. Laredo, TX
Lives and works in Washington, DC

JA$$IE is a musician, visual artist and educator questioning the relationship between language , naute and technology via interdisciplinary and conceptual drawing methods. She teaches undergraduate Drawing and 3D Design at the Catholic University of America and also teaches Darkroom and Digital Photography at the Visual and Performing Arts program at Suitland High School with Prince George’s County Public Schools.  She holds a K-12 Advanced Professional Teaching Certification in Visual Arts and a 200 YTT Certification in Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga.

Originally from Laredo, Texas, a border city, shaped the way Jassie mixes and blends ideas, material and media. Growing up along the Rio Grande influenced her ways of thinking about nature, movement, territory and language. Along border systems, hybrid modes of being are engrained in the architecture of the everyday. It is the overlap in the diagram where Jassie plays. Her work draws inspiration from Hip-Hop, Philosophy, Nature, Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.

JA$$IE’s work has been recognized by Suzanne Ciani, Perry Cook, and Teenage Engineering who juried the 2018 Margaret Guthman New Instrument Design Competition; awarding Jassie the prestigious New Musical Instrument Design Award at Georgia Tech for her instrument GramFX, a hybrid turntable programmed in Pure Data  In 2023-2024 she was awarded the Creative Leaders Fellowship: Towards 2040 with Words, Beats and Life. Artist in Residence at Signal Culture, Owego, NY. She has performed and exhibited at the Kennedy Art Center (Washington, DC), Eaton Hotel (Washington, DC), Katzen Art Center (Washington, DC), Torpedo Factory Art Center (Arlington, VA), Rhizome DC (Washington, DC),  Wave Farm (Acra, NY), ShapeShifter Lab (Gowanus, NY),  2016 Pure Data Conference at Stevens Institute for Technology (Hoboken, NJ).