Beyond Register: A Conversation with Visual Index’s Jessie Rae Moncla

Walk into Visual Index on any given afternoon and you may find Jessie Rae Moncla with her hands full, in the middle of it all — answering a question about a ceramic vessel, straightening a shelf of prints, or chatting with a customer who came in “just to look” and is now forty-five minutes deep into a conversation about what encaustic painting is (hint: you layer pigmented beeswax on wood panels). 

The gallery’s Winston-Salem storefront frames her: fabric pieces hang beside woodwork, paintings share walls with prints, and a mural in Jessie’s own hand spans the ceiling’s upper beams.

Jessie has been part of Visual Index since nearly the beginning—almost eight years working alongside founder Toni Tronu, whom she met in the painting and photography departments at UNCG. But Jessie doesn’t just work in an art gallery, she makes art. She always has. From an arts-focused middle school in High Point to Weaver Academy in Greensboro to the painting program at UNCG, she built a practice rooted in color, line, and the kind of tactile making you can’t achieve on a screen. Today her work—figurative, bold, vividly personal—lives in the same ecosystem she helps tend every day.

That dual perspective—artist and gallery staffer, maker and guide—is exactly what makes talking with Jessie so interesting. She knows what goes into a piece before a customer ever picks it up. And she’s spent years finding ways to share that knowledge without making anyone feel like they need a degree to appreciate it (even though she has one!). 

We sat down to discuss what it’s like being both behind and in front of the register, her artistic influences, and sustaining a studio practice while navigating chronic disease.

I hope our conversation encourages you to strike up a conversation with Jessie the next time you’re in Visual Index, get to know a few of her influences, and learn more about the condition that affects 1 of 10 women of reproductive age globally every day.

AS: You’re both a maker and someone who helps other people’s work find homes. What’s that like?

JRM: I think it helps with my job a lot. As a maker, I can tell people how things are created—I can usually figure out what the artist was thinking about, what their process looked like. And because I know how much work goes into being an artist, I understand the struggle of selling work, of being consistent in the studio, all those different aspects of being a working artist. It informs everything I do here.

But it also inspires me. Being surrounded by so many amazing makers all the time—some of our artists are in their seventies and eighties and they’re just constantly turning out work. That keeps me going. It’s part of an artist’s practice to look at art, to figure out how people are making things and stay part of the conversation.

AS: Does knowing how something is made change the way a customer connects with it?

JRM: Basically, yes. Especially people who aren’t artists—who come in because they need a new piece for their bedroom and don’t really know much about art but want something. I actually love talking to those people because they’re always really appreciative. I can teach them about different materials, explain what something took to make. And a lot of people just don’t realize how much work goes into making things and honing those skills. Once they do, something shifts.

We have pieces made of fabric right beside pieces made of wood, pieces made of tile, encaustic—so many different materials. And when someone understands what they’re looking at, it becomes so much more interesting to them. “Oh, that’s fabric? That’s amazing.” That moment of recognition is one of my favorite things about this job.

AS: Tell me about your own work. What do you make?

JRM: My style touches on realism but is really heavily influenced by cartoons and comics—I love that world so much. A lot of my work is very heavily outlined. I moved away from oil paints after school and toward acrylics, gouache, and ink, which just made more sense for what I do. I’ve always been drawn to flat color and graphic line—Art Nouveau was an early influence. And I love indie comics, the weird stuff. An artist called Lee Lai has always really inspired me.

My work has changed a lot over the years. For a while it was obnoxiously colorful—just layering and layering. I still use a lot of color, but more neutralized. And over the past few years I’ve been exploring more personal territory. Throughout college I started having a lot of symptoms I didn’t understand—chronic fatigue, GI issues, all kinds of things stacking up—I was very, very sick. A decade later, I finally got an endometriosis diagnosis. I started making work about that experience: trying to tie my colorful, outlined style to more serious subjects. It’s been really cathartic, and it’s helped me connect with other people going through the same thing.

Endocare is terrible. Endometriosis is under-researched, it’s very common, one in ten women have it. It took me almost eleven years to get a diagnosis because every doctor was dismissive. I kept pushing, kept advocating for myself, and eventually found my surgeon through the online endo community. In 2022 I was able to have excision surgery, and I am so much better. That community—people helping each other find answers—is actually what got me through it.

AS: You also do mural and wall work. How did that start?

JRM: Around 2017, a garden center in Greensboro contacted me to paint this huge installation on a wooden storage structure—sunflowers, big bold shapes. That was my first mural, and it led to more. For a while I was doing really large-scale pieces, but I’ve had to scale back recently due to an injury. 

Now the wall work I do is smaller—I actually have a piece right now at the Red Dog Gallery, on one of their outdoor walls nearby on Liberty Street. In another life I think I’d be one of those people knocking out enormous walls constantly. It’s so fun.

AS: You’ve described yourself as shy. But you’ve worked retail, engaging with the public, since you were fifteen. How do those two things coexist?

JRM: This job has really brought me out of my shell. I think what helps is that you never really know what you’re going to be doing when you come in—who’s going to walk through the door, what you’ll be talking about. 

I’ve gotten really good at improvisation. And this is by far the best environment I’ve ever worked in. I’ve met people from all over the world here, had conversations I never would have had anywhere else. 

An artist from Los Angeles once came in and we started talking about music—turns out he had a daughter who painted, and her style was kind of similar to mine. We exchanged information. We became online friends. Stuff like that happens all the time.

AS: What do people not understand about working in a space like this?

JRM: I think just like every retail job, there are a thousand moving parts. We’re doing the inventory, the back-end e-commerce work, everything. It’s a lot. 

Remembering information about all the artists is a huge challenge, because we carry work by so many people—I’m constantly refreshing my memory. But Toni and I are both super passionate about making art accessible and making this space feel really good, casual, not stuffy. 

Not “you can’t touch anything.” That’s a big goal. We really encourage people to pick things up, hold them, get to know the pieces.

AS: What do you want for your own practice, going forward?

JRM: I just want to be happy and make work. I haven’t had a good long stretch of real studio time in a while—between health stuff and everything else, it’s been hard to build a body of work. That’s what I’m working toward. I did a solo show last March, all small work focused on endometriosis, during Endo Awareness Month—that felt really right. I’d love to do that again, but bigger.

And I really, really love it here. I want to be at Visual Index as long as I can. I’ve watched this place grow from the very beginning, and there’s something special about that. It keeps inspiring me. Seeing what our artists are making, watching people discover something they didn’t know they were looking for—it never gets old.

HAVE YOU HEARD OF THEM?

Ask Jessie about her artistic influences the next time you visit Visual Index:

Contemporary Influences

• Sam McKenzie (b. 1980s, Australia) — Brisbane-based artist, illustrator, and punk musician whose bold, flat style draws from arcade games, comics, and underground music culture. The kind of work that’s unapologetically fun and technically sharp at the same time.
  
  

• Anna Dietzel (b. 1996, Italy) — Verona-based illustrator whose work skews dark, dense, and gorgeous—heavily influenced by demonology texts and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. Spooky in the best way.
  
  

• Savanna Judd (Heartslob) (b. c. 1998, USA) — Illustrator and animator known for luminous, atmosphere-heavy scenes where light bends in unusual ways and empty spaces feel alive. Her work captures the feeling of a place just after the people have left.
  
  

• Emily Carroll (E.M. Carroll) (b. 1983, Canada) — Award-winning graphic novelist and horror comics artist best known for Through the Woods. Think folk-tale dread.
  
  

• Natalie Hall (active 2000s–present, USA) — Los Angeles-based illustrator and tattoo artist who has done concept work for major studios, including contributing to Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water. Her illustration style is detailed, textured, otherworldly.
  
  

• Arantza Peña Popo (b. c. 2001, Colombia/USA) — Afro-Colombian cartoonist, zinester, and Ignatz Award nominee whose vibrant, slice-of-life comics explore queerness, mental health, and identity. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and on Cartoon Network.
  
  

• Tanya Marcuse (b. 1964, USA) — Photographer and Guggenheim Fellow whose large-scale, obsessively constructed tableaux blend the natural world with the fantastical. Her work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and SFMOMA. If you’ve ever wanted a photograph that looks like a Bosch painting, this is your artist.
  
  

• Lee Lai (b. 1993, Australia) — Trans Asian-Australian cartoonist living in Montreal, whose debut graphic novel Stone Fruit won the Lambda Literary Award and was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. Her comics about queer relationships and family are sharp, funny, and emotionally precise.
  
  

• Mike Mignola (b. 1960, USA) — Creator of Hellboy and one of the most influential stylists in comics history. His signature look — heavy shadows, clunky shapes, gothic atmosphere — has been described as German Expressionism meets Jack Kirby. If you like monsters with depth, this is where to start.
  
  

• Junji Ito (b. 1963, Japan) — Japan’s master of horror manga, known for Uzumaki, Tomie, and Gyo. His obsessively detailed illustrations turn everyday fears — spirals, fish, a beautiful girl — into something deeply and specifically terrifying.

Classic Influences

• Claude Cahun (1894–1954, France) — Surrealist photographer and writer who used self-portraiture to question gender identity decades before the language existed to name it. Radical, strange, world-altering.
  
  

• Léon Bakst (1866–1924, Russia) — Painter and theatrical designer for the Ballets Russes whose saturated, jewel-toned costumes and sets changed the visual language of the stage. Ornate doesn’t quite cover it.
  
  

• Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898, England) — Art Nouveau illustrator who packed more decadence, wit, and menace into black-and-white ink than most artists manage in a lifetime. He was 25 when he died, and his work still looks ahead of its time.
  
  

• Mikhail Vrubel (1856–1910, Russia) — Symbolist painter obsessed with demons — literally. His Demon series features figures of profound, fragmented beauty that feel like they’re breaking apart at the edges. Byzantine, mosaic-like, haunted.
  
  

• Camille Billops (1933–2019, USA) — African American sculptor, printmaker, filmmaker, and archivist who spent her career telling difficult personal truths through art and building the Hatch-Billops Collection, one of the most important archives of Black cultural history in the United States.
  
  

• The Limbourg Brothers (active c. 1385–1416, Netherlands) — Three Flemish brothers who created the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, widely considered the most beautiful illuminated manuscript ever made. Flat, graphic, and impossibly detailed—medieval illustration at its peak.
  
  

• Edward Gorey (1925–2000, USA) — American illustrator and author of darkly comic, alphabetically organized picture books populated by doomed children and unexplained catastrophes. Crosshatched fur coats, cryptic captions, and the best use of ambiguity in illustration history.
  
  

• Margaret Brundage (1900–1976, USA) — Pulp magazine cover artist whose pastel-chalk illustrations appeared on the covers of Weird Tales throughout the 1930s. The first woman to become a major contributor to pulp fiction art, and still one of the most distinctive voices in the genre.