2 Responses to “Jessica Wohl”

1. Susan Richmond
   

   August 24th, 2009 at 9:42 am

   Hi Jessica,
   I was wondering if you could share a statement about your work and working methods. Do you always feature children? What is your thinking about the layering and multiple perspectives?

   Thanks for posting.

   Susan

2. JessicaW1
   

   August 24th, 2009 at 1:26 pm

   Sure Susan, Thanks for the inquiry. My work does not feature children exclusively, but tends to revolve around posed images of a family or family members. Below is a statement about the nature of this body of work.

   Thanks,
   Jessica

   Families are strange, and I’m interested in why we try to pretend like they’re not. There is a familiarity we seek and feel with commonplace portraiture, and I investigate methods of making these familiar images seem oddly unfamiliar.

   Portraits generally display a desired, quintessential image of a person. It is often, however, that the image depicted is a façade for the myriad of personalities that make up the subject of the portrait. I’m interested in the complexities of people, and how their various identities are lost upon the capturing of a portrait and the image that remains.

   The multiple layering and duplication of each subject is inspired by the proliferation of the phenomena in which so many of us, like a society of clones, succumb to the standard of presenting ourselves to the world in a portrait in which a smiling face masks the true identities of the person within.

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