I. Artist Statement, Trace monotypes

This work comes from a person that is most comfortable on long road trips with cassette tapes filled with the familiar and a camera always within reach. The work is a response to Jessica’s love affair with bittersweet songs and paperback books with covers so worn that the books’ histories are visually apparent. The work means to affect in a similar way.

Through intimacy in layering, the transparency of papers and meditative mark making the prints invite the viewer to enter into them. Invite the viewer to read into them in a similar fashion to his or her own approach to a favorite book. To react to them in a similar way to a song that could just break hearts. These images serve as evidence of the body’s imprint on land, of our constant dialogue with the environment that surrounds. The figure is at times serving as emotive indicator to the space that it is placed within, whereas in other pieces, the environment emotionally overpowers the figure. In others, the figure has disappeared altogether. Through use of one recurrent character and the idea of stepping back and stepping forward via the lens of the camera, the viewer is able to investigate this narrative.

The chosen environments that are found in Jessica’s prints are places that are rich with ritual and history. Front porches, bedroom floors, bathrooms, kitchens, rural architecture found near roadsides. There is a familiarity to place that is indicative through the intimate drawn nature, but it is the gesture of the figures and the expression, or lack thereof, that communicates a certain unease. Through heavy reliance of patterning, cross-hatching, obsessive documentation of the textures intrinsically present in our daily surroundings one is left to wonder. The line quality of these works has a certain hesitation that is to be read as truthfulness of documentation. The prints are literally tracings of photographs. They are visual representations of a moment that has passed, of a history. The paper in the prints serves as a physical barrier between the viewer and the moment that has passed. Through viewing these prints from the backside one is left with the residue of the moment, what remains.