ARTIST STATEMENT
“My Son and I, This Evening’s Reflection” My son is four as I write this.
Motherhood is layered.
I try to envision the expansive landscape of the future.
But so often parents’ duties are in the moment – close, physical, littered with minutiae.
This evening I reflect on the day.
He and I are so alike; it is inevitable that we will butt heads. In addition to being a mother, I am a practicing artist and educator. Much of my work examines embodied perception and highlights visual phenomena, like the demonstrable differences between lens-based photography and human vision. Here the camera has been rejected entirely, and using a technique similar to “scanner obscura,” each element is digitized through the process of scanning. For me this is a transformative process that shifts the properties of the physical object into re-contextualized digital variants. I’m interested in revealing the unique visual properties that arise from scanning with RGB sensors, so I highlighted visual elements like the color banding glitch and shallow depth of field that are phenomena of this process. The glitch and close space also reflect my emotional state. The elements coming in and out of focus are not physical objects to me, but carefully constructed symbols. They stand in for my son and I, but also for my feelings about motherhood and my evolving identity.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jessica Larva is a contemporary artist whose work explores phenomena of visual perception. She earned a BFA and MFA in new media art at the Ohio State University, and now lives in Chicago, Illinois where she is an Associate Professor in the Art School at DePaul University. Larva’s artwork has been exhibited in notable exhibitions including solo shows “From Where I Stand” in Riley Hall Gallery at the University of Notre Dame, “Leeward” at the College of Southern Nevada in Las Vegas, and “Fluid Horizons” at Ohio Dominican University. Other recent exhibitions include “Flourish” at the d’Art Center in Virginia, “Insight” at the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Massachusetts, and “Inhabit” at the Manifest Gallery in Ohio. Larva was formerly the studio assistant for artist Ann Hamilton and a founding member of Fuse Factory, an art and technology non-profit.
© Jessica Larva