BIO
Jessica Page was born and raised in rural Michigan. In 2009 she received her BFA in photography from Kendall College of Art and Design along with earning the Studio Excellence Award for photography. After graduating she worked at LaFontsee Galleries, in Grand Rapids, MI for seven years refining her craft and aesthetic eye. She then spent the next three years in Arizona, being inspired by the desert and continuing to exhibit her artwork. Currently, Page lives and creates in Kentucky where, after completing her Master’s of Fine Art in Studio Art, she is now Visiting Lecturer in Photo and Video at University of Kentucky. She is fascinated with familia ties, the natural world and the connectivity of memory and emotions.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work is an intimate, personal, and archeological exercise. As humans, we try to understand ourselves in relation to those around us by looking through old photographs or objects we receive from parents, grandparents, or aunts and uncles. These momentos act as windows into the lives of past generations and offer up connecting threads between their lives and ours. In my work, I strive to understand what is concrete and what is conjectured. I create and excavate narrative to gain expanded comprehension of humanity and those close to me.
My work incorporates the physical evidence and ephemera of domestic settings, dissecting and reassembling strata of narrative to understand human connection and how it is morphed by the passage and pressures of time. I employ different modes and materials; constructing drywall panels to establish stories about the homes’ occupants, physically weaving photographs together, molding clay into forms that are alike but also varied, layering sensory facets into installations to give an impression of transitory remembrance , projecting onto domestic spaces and window coverings, and rebuilding and archiving personal memories through video.
With varied material references, my work acknowledges the multitude of ways in which we perceive the world around us. My wall panel works, Kitchen, Living Room, and Bathroom, are fragments of domestic spaces, showing the Witness marks left behind by the previous occupants. These remnants inform our musings of who those inhabitants were. The nuanced ceramic clock surfaces in the Time in the Thick Present series, allude to how humans are, on a whole the same, but still individual. We are a composite blend of our life experiences and the people around us.
These processes of building connections with others creates and fosters empathy and is important as we navigate and understand our world and our place in it. In humanism, there is an emphasis on social potential and a belief in helping other people. Balance is created in learning from the past and others, once insight is received an action should follow that will enhance and reshape the future.
Please send any questions to jpage402@gmail .com
instagram: jessicapageartistphotographer
All images © JPagePhotography
Jessica Page 