Alternative Facts:
Jessica Just

Jessica Just

Alternative Facts: Photography by Any Means
Artist Statement, 2021

All the other in between moments are summoned: tapping, nudging, whispering. Remembering to bite into the ice cream sandwich without inhibition, ignoring the cold pains shooting into our now matured teeth. Seeing fourth grade stitches and scars in every glass coke bottle passing between late night tacos that you will regret, but not really. Finding accidental love letters on the counter tops with the remnants of after school snacks, after work snacks, after ever after snacks. Magnified traces of presence, stillness, and contemplation linger here.

The perpetuation and transmission of personal mythology guides my photographic impulses to explore memories that are vivid, yet strangely vague and seemingly unimportant. Certain colors and objects can bring about instant recollection of an environment or experience, but the ability to place oneself in a timeline is lost. By illuminating the small habits and repetitions within family, they become symbols, icons, and subconscious exercises that frame the underpinnings of familial and group culture as unspoken requests to be understood. Integrating tactile elements in my work has been an important way to discuss intimacy, understanding, and the bonds we strive to make and maintain. In turn, the images become wistful, and in a way, forlorn. The act of momentary transportation into a place that you are not sure if you dreamt or physically experienced becomes a respite, an escape to a place that is familiar, maudlin, and intimate.

Embossed text becomes part of the images, vignetted suggestions of relationships to familial experience and personal stories. Transitory and magnified traces of presence, fantasies, stillness, and contemplation linger in the poems, short narratives, and images.

On display March 1 – April 12, 2021 at the PACE Center Art Gallery:

Photograph by Jessica Just

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