These images represent two separate but related performances. The photograph on the left represents my practice of merging body and landscape in the woods of Rabun County, Georgia. My intention in this practice is to blur the boundaries between nature and self in order to explore the quiet unfolding relationship between the body, earth and [...]
There are two elements to Initiation – the drawing/painting and the handmade object. In both I weave together parts of myself with parts of an animal. The idea of seams is important in my work. My intent is to create an image for the viewer to wonder over. For example, is [...]
Though my work as a whole bridges mediums from video to miniature sculpture, recently, I have been most invested in making drawings.
Drawing, I feel, provides an immediacy and intimacy necessary to these works. Drawing was our (human beings’) earliest means to communicate ideas, tens of thousands of years before the advent of written language, seen [...]
My process involves traveling to remote woods in North Georgia and opening myself to connecting to place; to the plants, animals, soil, rocks and leaves. I open my senses to receive the distinct fecund scents, the rush of wind through the cells in my skin, the call of birds and tremble of wings, the chorus of leaves and the bare earth under my feet. I set the intention of feeling and sensing the silent conversation between things and insert my own body and being into the dialogue. I can feel the rhythms and cycles of nature and how my body innately understands and matches its own breathing to the breath of the landscape. What can feel like thick impenetrable boundaries between inner-self and outer world begin to soften as self and environment bleed into one another. My body knows and remembers the earth. I employ different techniques to facilitate the connection: I press my chest against the soil to feel the heartbeat of the earth; paste leaves and sticks on my skin to feel the flesh of the world; and sometimes use pigment applied to my own body to mimic the bark of a tree. I am interested in the unfolding relationship between self and nature.
When I return to my urban-based studio, I attempt to recreate my experience in the woods. I use man-made materials such as felt tip markers, stickers, metallic paint, processed wood and neon color, as well as organic materials such as collected sticks, sand, soil, grass, bark and organic inks to explore the distance between and intersection of manufactured landscape and organic environments. At times, I reinsert my own body in the piece to further highlight the distance between urban and remote spaces. Through a process of deep surrender I use my body and energy to reengage the sense of connection I felt while in the organic world within an artificial environment.
‘AWICHA YARTIRI’ is a proposal for an on-site installation which highlights the parallels of Bolivian and Korean culture, which still respects indigenous traditions in a contemporary climate.
‘AWICHA YARTIRI’ layers images, colors and objects derived from my personal mythology and genetic memory against architectural models and objects appropriated from traditional Korean Mudang (shaman) Gut (ritual) “Spirit [...]
The project is simple. I go to bars and approach men I don’t know. I ask if I can literally throw myself at them. Then I ask if I can take a picture of that moment. The men are picked based on their size; on the possibility that they can handle having 135 pounds come hurtling through the air. In other words, I pick men who I think can take a hit . The resulting pictures show me in mid-air with my arms stretched towards the person who might catch me. I am, at that moment, part projectile and part foolish romantic. These images are documents of a hopeful and violent gesture, a demand that the possibility of a connection exist. The men often look terrified or at least slightly surprised. My role as aggressor is clear and I think of my leaps as feminist acts that acknowledge a basic desire for contact.
To date, there have been no major injuries.
I was raised in small towns in the southwest where I spent a lot of time at rodeos. I won a few ribbons and once sold a sheep for a decent price. I was formally educated at The University of Arizona, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Fine Arts Work Center. The time spent at those institutions increased my unabashed interest in the cliché and the literal as well my often misguided attempts at making authentic connections. In a few months, I will be moving to Los Angeles and I am looking forward to making more artwork about sunsets, romance, and frustration.
Nuclear Family Series
More info on Nuclear Family Series
Season’s Greetings ‘04, 2004, 11″ x 8.5″, inkjet print
Nuclear Family is a photographic series of my husband and myself posing as a young married couple in suburbia with an imaginary silhouetted baby. I lived most of my life in urban settings. In the second year of the marriage, [...]
A Short History: Starring Asme as Herself / animation / 1min:36sec / 2007
(click here to view full animation)
pamela phatsimo sunstrum invents an alter ego named Asme who embodies a notion that multiple, alternate or hybrid identities can emerge through journeying, travel and other processes of (dis)location. In collages, drawings, experimental animations and performance, the many [...]
Jessica Westbrook is an artist working with photography, video, motion, semiotics, language, and information design. Her projects explore desire, cues, cultural artifacts, and contradictory sensations that vacillate between fortune and catastrophe. Increasingly semantic in nature and modular in form, she considers her work a section of visual language culled from a complex matrix of assets, [...]
“Buffy Summers #2″ (2007). 15 x 22 inches. Cross-stitched Embroidery
“Everybody Hurts” , a series of cross-stitched embroideries based on television screencaptures, explores mediated emotion. TV shows are contemporary myths, which help us to define who we are, individually and in relation to our culture. Cross-stitching a single moment from a time-based medium is an act [...]