ARTIST STATEMENT
As an artist, activist and academic, my work has centered on equity and social justice, and more loosely on ideas of inclusion and exclusion.
The pieces here address aspirational and physical routes that are deliberately blocked or obscured. We see a young boy looking through fencing. His face is deliberately difficult to discern, in deference to how imposed barriers obscure and diminish personhood, and so fuel the cultural construction of political barriers to recognition of our common humanity. Or a trio of young girls, standing together and looking in three directions at the world around them, displaced from their cultural home and assessing the unfamiliar. Borderlands become places of suspicion and uncertainty, of holding onto one’s roots internally while moving away from them physically. How does a child process the mix of hope, confusion and fear — wondering, perhaps, what about themselves is deserving of unseeing judgement and dismissal?
ABOUT THE ARTIST
I am a self-taught artist and photographer. I approach photography as ethnography, extending from my professional career as an anthropologist, researcher and university faculty (retired). My work in light-based media also includes documentary film and theatre lighting design.
Since 2015 my work has focused on digital art/photography, including physical techniques of light manipulation, and digital exploration of my new and archival photographs.
This work has been included in exhibitions at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art (LACDA); Blank Wall Gallery in Athens, Greece; Chania International Photography Festival, Crete; and galleries in Rome; Barcelona; Halifax; Manhattan; Minneapolis; and Portland, OR. My work also has been included in curated virtual exhibitions including London; Finland; San Francisco; Santa Fe; Chicago; and Honolulu.
© Jo Scheder