Jessica Westbrook
Jessica Westbrook, Nature Scenes: Best of Times / Worst of Times
Jessica Westbrook, Nature Scenes: Best of Times / Worst of Times
Jessica Westbrook, Nature Scenes: Best of Times / Worst of Times
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, reconfigured and repurposed per space and time. New works push mundane composites into spectacular territory.
Westbrook received her MFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University in Philadelpha, PA and has exhibited nationally and internationally including exhibitions and media festivals in Spain, France, China, Russia, and Switzerland. In 2005 she established SEED, an artist collective based in Chattanooga, Tennessee. In 2009 she began collaborating in TEH with Phillip Andrew Lewis and Adam Trowbridge. TEH is an art and technology research group with special interests in simulation and interactivity.
Westbrook’s recent creative research has lead to publication in Static, the Journal of the London Consortium in association with Architectural Association, Birkbeck College (University of London), the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Science Museum and Tate, and a solo feature on Chicago’s artstorage.org. Recent collections acquisition includes the 809 International Museum, in Yichang City, China and the Newark Public Library Special Collections, in Newark, NJ. Upcoming projects include a commission/visiting lecture in collaboration with by APSU’s TERMINAL internet art program, based upon her research in interactive video, popular media, and feminist psychology. Westbrook received Allied Arts Individual Artists Grants in 2005 and 2006, and a private Lyndhurst grant for curating/SEED programming in 2009. She is Assistant Professor of Art at UT Chattanooga where she teaches courses in both the photography/media arts and graphic design concentrations.
Hi Jessica,
Several of the artists on the blog, such as Shana Robbins and Jenny Kendler, are also exploring issues of nature and the landscape. I would like to learn more about the Nature Scenes image. How do you frame its relationship to the theme of the Losing Yourself project?
Best,
Jillian
Hi JillianH. Thank you for the question. This is new work, so I am going to describe some of the process/how I arrived here. My thoughts are still developing. This is a new conversation.
In relation to the sample I have posted above I am particularly interested in the ideas (contradictions and struggles and meaning) you describe here: “By producing spaces in which individualism and personal choices are simultaneously espoused and curtailed, this network of cultural discourse blurs traditional distinctions between private and public, self-empowerment and self-surveillance, consumerism and activism.”
I have been working on an inventory of “Nature Scenes” for several years. Initially this work involved capturing a “drive-by” natural world, the accessible and familiar (if not mundane) wild space typology you see everyday between home and work, work and home. To avoid a specific narrative and keep the work functioning as a system of visual cues/samples, I “neutralize” the images through consistent rules of engagement (subject/framing, lighting/timing considerations) and editing in post-production (subtractive, removal of brand indicators, flaws, distractions, identity, etc). The images end up struggling for meaning on their own, so context/relationship is necessary.
More recently I began working in the studio, making images of packaged foods. Each product in this series is sugar-free, and in this actually provides more plastic package than energy, more spectacle than substance, and meets more desire (psychology) than any need (biology). This work is in direct response to living a pharma dependent lifestyle. I’m an insulin dependent diabetic – so Sugar free foods are a regular feature in my life. While I am grateful to the science behind sugar-free, and I indulge unapologetically, I am weary of the broader health and cultural implications of these fake foods. I cycle through the contradictions: absurd/logical, excessive/empty, nourishing/poisonous, controlled/indulgent.
Together these projects: the meaningless nature scenes, and the empty foods are combined in image mash ups. With the addition of simulated lights and sparkles, this work is becoming its own spectacle. I am interested in this absurd fantasy, perhaps as a coping mechanism for a disconnection from the environment and biological dependency on medication to stay alive (?). It could be that I’m not sure what real is (anymore), but I think I want to construct a perfect substitute, a simulacra, or in relation to the loss of self, a surrogate product placement in a perfect place. I think I am attempting to make work that communicates a sense of joy and optimism, but can’t escape an underlying struggle for power/meaning/purpose/resolution/honesty. This may be my connection with the gendered subjectivity theme – complexity, shifting definitions, identification, consumption, and vulnerability.
Dear Jessica,
Thanks for writing about your work and explaining your take on the rapport between consumption and identity.
Could you/would you post other examples from the Nature Scenes series?
Is your work often read by viewers as gendered? What are the visual cues that connect this series to the notion of gendered subjectivity?
Look forward to seeing more.
Regards,
Cathy
Apologies for delay in reply! I just posted a couple of additional samples. I’m not sure if the reading is immediately gendered but the “concerns” are. When I present this work I think it can’t help but to reflect/represent issues of environment, eating, fairy tales… all assigned/gendered.