Jessica M. Kaufman

Untitled I
palladium print, beeswax, hair
10 x 8 in.

In this untitled series, I offer up my own body, fragmented and cleared of its history, as a canvas upon which a new topography of bruises and scars appears through jaundiced skin. The ‘skin’ is beeswax, worked into palladium prints so that they are rendered translucent. The ‘bruises’ are clots of hair beneath the surface that emerge as uncanny simulacra of the real thing. While the images are undeniably disturbing, I seek to make them immediately, and compellingly, beautiful, commanding the viewer to question paradoxical links between beauty and pain that pervade both our cultural and individual identities, and the specific ways in which that conflict is played out on the field of the female body.

© Jessica M. Kaufman