Paonia, Colorado 2002. C-print
Paonia,
Colorado 2002.
C-print
JODIE VICENTA JACOBSON,
selected by
Andrea Modica, is currently working toward her MFA at Hunter College in NYC. She
received her BA in Studio Arts from Colorado College in 1999 and was a Woodstock
Photography Workshop intern that same year. She has worked with numerous
galleries including Robert Mann, Yancey Richardson, and John Stevenson, all in
NYC, and is presently a teaching assistant to Lois Connor and Roy DeCarava, both
at Hunter. Prior to this show she has shown at Princeton University.
With
the same human intuition that compels me to eat, sleep, have sex, and breathe, I
make photographs. From the moment I was given my grandfather's camera, I
became engaged in a love affair with the frame. Making pictures is a part
of my everyday life. It is the subtle beauty of my daily experience that
compels me to capture what would otherwise go
unnoticed. I
find aesthetic virtue in the ordinary, while simultaneously seeing beauty in
highly personal engagements. I see my pictures as formally reconciled
compositions dedicated to the human experience and the overlooked poetics of
light, shade, color and mood that exist in our very homes, streets, landscapes
and families. As I see it, the fragmented nature of the human consciousness
is reflected in how I react to what presents itself to me as interesting and
possible subject matter. The way I take pictures and the way I put them
together is analogous to the human thought process. It is actually quite simple. The
tangential modes of thinking are quite poetic. One does not always think in
a linear fashion, there are voluptuous interruptions that keep life interesting. I
am seduced by these sensual disruptions and aestheticize them photographically
in a way that in turn hopefully seduces whomever may encounter them. I use
my aesthetic sensibilities in order to create what may be viewed as beautiful
and compelling by any person from any walk of life. In this case, my
pictures function as reflections of universal feelings, or memories. The
thread that ties together all of the work I have done thus far in my life is me. It
is my eye that guides me through life, picking out what unveils itself to me as
compelling both aesthetically and situationally, while choosing to render it
using light, shade and the elegant frame. Framing is like painting, the
edges are my paintbrush. Influenced by as many painters as photographers, I
like to see my style as painterly. The transcendental colors of a Barnett
Newman painting are as important to me as I compose as the raw feelings of
humanity emoted in a photograph by Roy DeCarava. The poems of William Carlos
Williams use words to say what I endeavor to say with images. In my eyes,
the "unconscious optics" talked about by Walter Benjamin, and the
"blind field" suggested by Roland Barthes are two psychological ideas
that are imbued with the mystery of the unconscious, and give life to my method
in the same way the aforementioned artists operate within the liminal space
between suggestion, the unknown, and the commonplace. I hope to reconcile
what is outside the frame with what lies in the imagination of the viewer.
I mean to
create the
desire to step into the frame, to make the place habitable, the person
accessible, the color or the tone a luscious invitation into my world within the
world.