Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Monday, February 16, 2009
in situ / february
My first attempt at indoor shots for In Situ and I am very happy with the results, although I'm not sure that these shots investigate my body in relation to their surroundings quite as much as the vast, aloneness of the outdoor shots. I do like the psychology of the feet to the upper righthand side of the feet shot.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Sunday, January 25, 2009
And from here
I am currently looking for employment again. Making steps toward the future and loving my family in the time being. The healing power of family is immeasurable and beautiful, do not know what I would do without such a supporting family. Being jobless and frugal makes you so appreciative of the things that you have, that you always had, the things that give you strength to carry on. Family, songs, and the comforts of good food and a bed.
Monday, January 12, 2009
and as of late/
Day-Trippers/
the Jewish Community Center, Rose Blumpkin Building
January 4th thru January 19th, 2009
Grop Show with Andrew Hershey, Natalie Lindstrom, Jessica Ann Mills, Dan Perry, and Anne Rehrmund-Burton
Photography Showcase/
Tugboat Gallery
February 2009
Curated by Kim Thomas
Bio/
Jessica Ann Mills was born in 1981 in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. She is a visual artist that lives and works in Omaha, Nebraska. She received her BFA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and her MFA from the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally; including such locations as Minneapolis, Atlanta, New Orleans, Fargo and Cairo, Egypt. She has recently been invited to present at the Mid-America Print Council Conference, participate in a print exchange with a group of emerging female artists, and exhibit collaborative work at the Graphica Creativa International Print Conference in Jyvaskyla, Finland.
Grounding Statements/
Grounding is a series of images that investigates the body’s relation to land. It examines how silent and sublime a place can feel when one approaches it alone. It opens up a dialogue with its viewers questioning the emotional implications of this kind of solitary journey. These images have a timeless quality and can be read as either beautifully intense field studies of place or slightly eerie images of a single subject’s legs segmented from her body. They recall fairytales and fables which typically have a female protagonist pitted against an amalgam of evils.
the Jewish Community Center, Rose Blumpkin Building
January 4th thru January 19th, 2009
Grop Show with Andrew Hershey, Natalie Lindstrom, Jessica Ann Mills, Dan Perry, and Anne Rehrmund-Burton
Photography Showcase/
Tugboat Gallery
February 2009
Curated by Kim Thomas
Bio/
Jessica Ann Mills was born in 1981 in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. She is a visual artist that lives and works in Omaha, Nebraska. She received her BFA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and her MFA from the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally; including such locations as Minneapolis, Atlanta, New Orleans, Fargo and Cairo, Egypt. She has recently been invited to present at the Mid-America Print Council Conference, participate in a print exchange with a group of emerging female artists, and exhibit collaborative work at the Graphica Creativa International Print Conference in Jyvaskyla, Finland.
Grounding Statements/
Grounding is a series of images that investigates the body’s relation to land. It examines how silent and sublime a place can feel when one approaches it alone. It opens up a dialogue with its viewers questioning the emotional implications of this kind of solitary journey. These images have a timeless quality and can be read as either beautifully intense field studies of place or slightly eerie images of a single subject’s legs segmented from her body. They recall fairytales and fables which typically have a female protagonist pitted against an amalgam of evils.
Friday, October 3, 2008
The Talk:
The Highway Kind/ presentation notes by Jessica Ann Mills
[MAPC '08/ A Sense of Space Panel]
I will begin today with a passage from Virginia Woolf's novel To The Lighthouse in which she states: For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she felt the need of—to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.
I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. During my late teens and early twenties, I began traveling extensively to different regions of the country. It was during this time that I began to understand the crisis of identity that I had to face as being a resident of the largest city in a primarily rural, agricultural state. To the outsider, what is to be a Nebraskan is to be rural. But to other Nebraskans (ones coming from towns with populations that remained indefinitely in the hundreds rather than the thousands), I was undoubtedly urban.
I took long drives throughout my formative years of college with the windows rolled down, piles of cassette tapes lining the floorboards of the car and my camera on the passenger seat. It was an experience quite similar to one that Rebecca Solnit described of her twenties in her book A Field Guide to Getting Lost, All those summer drives, no matter where I was going, to a person, a project, an adventure, or home, alone in the car with my social life all before and behind me, I was suspended in a beautiful solitude of an open road, in a kind of introspection that only outdoor space generates, for inside and outside are more intertwined than the usual distinctions allow.
Like Solnit, I now know that I was endlessly preoccupied by the seeming placelessness of the car because it seemed to me to echo the same questions I had about my own belonging to a certain place. I always felt both from a place and outside a place. The car was vehicle for my searching.
By searching country roads of gravel or the neighborhoods of Omaha with their suburban postwar appeal, I was trying to find my own azimuth, my own true north, my own home. I was longing for a sense of myself that I felt I had in some way been denied. In Lucy Lippard’s The Lure of the Local, there is a continual investigation of what it means to be either without center or multi-centered, how one finds a resting place coming out of the ashes of the unsettled:
Amd she said, Every landscape is a hermetic narrative: ‘Finding a fitting place for oneself in the world is finding a place for oneself in a story.’ The story is composed of mythologies, histories, ideologies—the stuff of identity and representation….Much has been written in the last twenty years or so about ‘the sense of place,’ which is symbiotically related to a sense of displacement.
As a child I was fascinated with things tucked within the pages of my parents’ yearbooks, the mason jars filled with different sized nails in hardware stores, and the book shelves of the homes we’d visit. My parents never fully described why they had collected things and did not tell too much about their childhood. I knew that we were not from Nebraska as so many of my schoolmates were. We were a weird mixture of Germans that had homesteaded in Minnesota and English that had come much earlier to New York State and stayed put for hundreds of years.
Even as a child, I felt quite alone in the process of understanding myself. Because of this, I most often took to making at a small child-sized table in our basement. I sat downstairs drawing or writing stories, while upstairs my mother cleaned house alone with the constant company of her record player. It was as a child that I started to collect. I kept everything, and because I kept everything, it all seemed to hold similar (special) value.
It is the act of collecting that is still of particular interest to me. It was as a collector that I set out on these adventures in my car to capture place. In my various bedrooms over the last few years, I have pinned up photographs near my bed of covered bridges in Ohio, of cotton fields in Georgia, of decaying farmhouses in Iowa. And although I wasn’t quite sure what it was in these photographs that caused me to keep them near to where I rested in the evenings, I still put them up every time I moved. These photographs seemed to quite harshly remind me of my own removal from the experience of the place that I had found. These were forgotten places, run-down, shabby places.
In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Solnit describes what she’s drawn to: The histories I’ve written have often been hidden, lost, neglected, too broad or too amorphous to show up in others’ radar screens, histories that are not neat fields that belong to someone but the paths and waterways that meander through many fields and belong to no one. These places to me were filled with mysteries and secrets, but the photographs communicated a sense of dinginess, of bleakness.
Two years ago, I began redrawing photographs. By tracing these images, I was able to explore the nuances of how certain structures could be translated into marks. I was able to feel as if I owned the moment that I had tried to capture through photography. To trace meant to go back to these places, to be within that place again for the hours I was sitting and making.
Through tracing, the images seemed to break down into a secret language of place, of sentiment, of nostalgia. The once cold photographs now seemed like suggestive vestiges of ink on wispy papers. What was created was a field of marks, both confident gestures and timid scratches. The language of marks in these tracings causes the images to at times obscure themselves to abstraction: the form of a tree becomes an intricate system of lines that read similarly to road maps, the gravel of a dirt lot becomes a series of marks indicative of Morse Code.
These images, verging on nostalgia, are best represented in the barest of forms—black ink on the natural surface of Kitakata. Kitakata sounds the way maps sound as they are being unfolded in the car. It carries evidence of its users just as maps tend to show their wear. With absence of color, one is able to step into these images; one is able to investigate and digest these places. One is able to work her way through these tracings to find meaning, to find solitude, to find the quiet of aloneness. These tracings become whispers or echoes of someone having once been present. In their silence, these images breathe in a way similar to the way these places were found. Gracefully, these translations preserve a moment: a moment now passed yet worthy of reverie. I am reminded now of a quotation from Susan Stewart’s book On Longing, which states: The countryside: space ideal, space of childhood, and death…. The countryside unfolds, maplike before us, simultaneous and immediate. And yet always the problems of horizon and distance, the problems of depth and breadth. As we begin to traverse the field of vision, the tragedy of our partial knowledge lies behind us.
These monotypes allow me to explore my emotional attachment to these places: an exterior space that through drawing explores the individual. It seemed important to me that finding these images was a solitary experience. There is a stillness to landscape when someone approaches it alone; a quiet that would be different or non-existent if someone else’s presence accompanied that moment. There was a profound sense of being and longing that happened in the space between myself and the land cast out in front of me. It was again in Rebecca Solnit that I found guidance. And she states that Every love has its landscape. Thus place, which is always spoken of as though it only counts when you’re present, possesses you in its absence, takes on another life as a sense of place, a summoning in the imagination with all the atmospheric effect and association of a powerful emotion. The places inside matter as much as the ones outside.
This work serves as a relic of things abandoned, of streets unnoticed and of objects with desired functions that seem to have been worn through. I act as a preservationist for things left behind that will with time become swallowed by the landscape in which they were left. I wander to find where this abandonment occurred. I document what remains of the forgotten to keep for others what I have found. I wish to communicate a sense of longing inherent in something misplaced, something left to wither and eventually disappear.
My presence echoes within these tracings through the visual evidence of my hand dragging across the delicate surface of the transparent papers. Mark-making helps me understand myself in relation to land and the way in which land can displace us as individuals. We can become lost in a place that is supposed to feel familiar. These tracings become a whisper of what I have encountered. They attempt to reveal something that could be overlooked.
The titles for these pieces reference the sentiment of songs with whole heck of a lot of twang. Songs with an understanding of what it means to slow down, what it means to actively engage with a place. The pairing of these words to these images is to establish that there is a history attached to these places. The inclusion of music in the titling of these pieces helps trigger a story complete with characters, setting, effect and emotion. This is an act of informing the unknown place with the known song, thus familiarizing the foreign. There is a silent dialogue within these images speaking to both the history of the maker as well as the history of the viewer. There is a sense of the Americanic, of colloquialism, of tradition.
It is lyricism and narrative that draw me to songs. These are songs that speak of the grit of a place and the desperation of its people that bring me back again and again. I am reminded when I listen to these songs of my mother’s record collection: the worn sleeve of an LP, the scratch of the vinyl, the cyclical rotation of the turntable. These characteristics directly relate to the process of my own making: the physicality of working for hours on a delicate piece of Japanese paper, the chatter of hand drag on the surface of these tracings, having to actually move around the print as I’m working, and the ritual of mark making. I return to these songs because they deal with ideas of what it is to be from some place and how land specifically informs one’s history, stories, and actions. I am quite aware now that my making is my own yearning for the companionship of another, as is the need of the songwriters in the songs that I chose to cite.
And I close with the ending words to the passage from Virginia Woolf I began with, Her horizon seemed to her limitless. From here, I will continue to make along with record scratch, seek within the confines of my car, turn places into an orchestration of abstractions and meditated through hatched lines. From here, I will get closer to the core of what it is to be from someplace, the core of what is to be someplace.
[MAPC '08/ A Sense of Space Panel]
I will begin today with a passage from Virginia Woolf's novel To The Lighthouse in which she states: For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she felt the need of—to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.
I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. During my late teens and early twenties, I began traveling extensively to different regions of the country. It was during this time that I began to understand the crisis of identity that I had to face as being a resident of the largest city in a primarily rural, agricultural state. To the outsider, what is to be a Nebraskan is to be rural. But to other Nebraskans (ones coming from towns with populations that remained indefinitely in the hundreds rather than the thousands), I was undoubtedly urban.
I took long drives throughout my formative years of college with the windows rolled down, piles of cassette tapes lining the floorboards of the car and my camera on the passenger seat. It was an experience quite similar to one that Rebecca Solnit described of her twenties in her book A Field Guide to Getting Lost, All those summer drives, no matter where I was going, to a person, a project, an adventure, or home, alone in the car with my social life all before and behind me, I was suspended in a beautiful solitude of an open road, in a kind of introspection that only outdoor space generates, for inside and outside are more intertwined than the usual distinctions allow.
Like Solnit, I now know that I was endlessly preoccupied by the seeming placelessness of the car because it seemed to me to echo the same questions I had about my own belonging to a certain place. I always felt both from a place and outside a place. The car was vehicle for my searching.
By searching country roads of gravel or the neighborhoods of Omaha with their suburban postwar appeal, I was trying to find my own azimuth, my own true north, my own home. I was longing for a sense of myself that I felt I had in some way been denied. In Lucy Lippard’s The Lure of the Local, there is a continual investigation of what it means to be either without center or multi-centered, how one finds a resting place coming out of the ashes of the unsettled:
Amd she said, Every landscape is a hermetic narrative: ‘Finding a fitting place for oneself in the world is finding a place for oneself in a story.’ The story is composed of mythologies, histories, ideologies—the stuff of identity and representation….Much has been written in the last twenty years or so about ‘the sense of place,’ which is symbiotically related to a sense of displacement.
As a child I was fascinated with things tucked within the pages of my parents’ yearbooks, the mason jars filled with different sized nails in hardware stores, and the book shelves of the homes we’d visit. My parents never fully described why they had collected things and did not tell too much about their childhood. I knew that we were not from Nebraska as so many of my schoolmates were. We were a weird mixture of Germans that had homesteaded in Minnesota and English that had come much earlier to New York State and stayed put for hundreds of years.
Even as a child, I felt quite alone in the process of understanding myself. Because of this, I most often took to making at a small child-sized table in our basement. I sat downstairs drawing or writing stories, while upstairs my mother cleaned house alone with the constant company of her record player. It was as a child that I started to collect. I kept everything, and because I kept everything, it all seemed to hold similar (special) value.
It is the act of collecting that is still of particular interest to me. It was as a collector that I set out on these adventures in my car to capture place. In my various bedrooms over the last few years, I have pinned up photographs near my bed of covered bridges in Ohio, of cotton fields in Georgia, of decaying farmhouses in Iowa. And although I wasn’t quite sure what it was in these photographs that caused me to keep them near to where I rested in the evenings, I still put them up every time I moved. These photographs seemed to quite harshly remind me of my own removal from the experience of the place that I had found. These were forgotten places, run-down, shabby places.
In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Solnit describes what she’s drawn to: The histories I’ve written have often been hidden, lost, neglected, too broad or too amorphous to show up in others’ radar screens, histories that are not neat fields that belong to someone but the paths and waterways that meander through many fields and belong to no one. These places to me were filled with mysteries and secrets, but the photographs communicated a sense of dinginess, of bleakness.
Two years ago, I began redrawing photographs. By tracing these images, I was able to explore the nuances of how certain structures could be translated into marks. I was able to feel as if I owned the moment that I had tried to capture through photography. To trace meant to go back to these places, to be within that place again for the hours I was sitting and making.
Through tracing, the images seemed to break down into a secret language of place, of sentiment, of nostalgia. The once cold photographs now seemed like suggestive vestiges of ink on wispy papers. What was created was a field of marks, both confident gestures and timid scratches. The language of marks in these tracings causes the images to at times obscure themselves to abstraction: the form of a tree becomes an intricate system of lines that read similarly to road maps, the gravel of a dirt lot becomes a series of marks indicative of Morse Code.
These images, verging on nostalgia, are best represented in the barest of forms—black ink on the natural surface of Kitakata. Kitakata sounds the way maps sound as they are being unfolded in the car. It carries evidence of its users just as maps tend to show their wear. With absence of color, one is able to step into these images; one is able to investigate and digest these places. One is able to work her way through these tracings to find meaning, to find solitude, to find the quiet of aloneness. These tracings become whispers or echoes of someone having once been present. In their silence, these images breathe in a way similar to the way these places were found. Gracefully, these translations preserve a moment: a moment now passed yet worthy of reverie. I am reminded now of a quotation from Susan Stewart’s book On Longing, which states: The countryside: space ideal, space of childhood, and death…. The countryside unfolds, maplike before us, simultaneous and immediate. And yet always the problems of horizon and distance, the problems of depth and breadth. As we begin to traverse the field of vision, the tragedy of our partial knowledge lies behind us.
These monotypes allow me to explore my emotional attachment to these places: an exterior space that through drawing explores the individual. It seemed important to me that finding these images was a solitary experience. There is a stillness to landscape when someone approaches it alone; a quiet that would be different or non-existent if someone else’s presence accompanied that moment. There was a profound sense of being and longing that happened in the space between myself and the land cast out in front of me. It was again in Rebecca Solnit that I found guidance. And she states that Every love has its landscape. Thus place, which is always spoken of as though it only counts when you’re present, possesses you in its absence, takes on another life as a sense of place, a summoning in the imagination with all the atmospheric effect and association of a powerful emotion. The places inside matter as much as the ones outside.
This work serves as a relic of things abandoned, of streets unnoticed and of objects with desired functions that seem to have been worn through. I act as a preservationist for things left behind that will with time become swallowed by the landscape in which they were left. I wander to find where this abandonment occurred. I document what remains of the forgotten to keep for others what I have found. I wish to communicate a sense of longing inherent in something misplaced, something left to wither and eventually disappear.
My presence echoes within these tracings through the visual evidence of my hand dragging across the delicate surface of the transparent papers. Mark-making helps me understand myself in relation to land and the way in which land can displace us as individuals. We can become lost in a place that is supposed to feel familiar. These tracings become a whisper of what I have encountered. They attempt to reveal something that could be overlooked.
The titles for these pieces reference the sentiment of songs with whole heck of a lot of twang. Songs with an understanding of what it means to slow down, what it means to actively engage with a place. The pairing of these words to these images is to establish that there is a history attached to these places. The inclusion of music in the titling of these pieces helps trigger a story complete with characters, setting, effect and emotion. This is an act of informing the unknown place with the known song, thus familiarizing the foreign. There is a silent dialogue within these images speaking to both the history of the maker as well as the history of the viewer. There is a sense of the Americanic, of colloquialism, of tradition.
It is lyricism and narrative that draw me to songs. These are songs that speak of the grit of a place and the desperation of its people that bring me back again and again. I am reminded when I listen to these songs of my mother’s record collection: the worn sleeve of an LP, the scratch of the vinyl, the cyclical rotation of the turntable. These characteristics directly relate to the process of my own making: the physicality of working for hours on a delicate piece of Japanese paper, the chatter of hand drag on the surface of these tracings, having to actually move around the print as I’m working, and the ritual of mark making. I return to these songs because they deal with ideas of what it is to be from some place and how land specifically informs one’s history, stories, and actions. I am quite aware now that my making is my own yearning for the companionship of another, as is the need of the songwriters in the songs that I chose to cite.
And I close with the ending words to the passage from Virginia Woolf I began with, Her horizon seemed to her limitless. From here, I will continue to make along with record scratch, seek within the confines of my car, turn places into an orchestration of abstractions and meditated through hatched lines. From here, I will get closer to the core of what it is to be from someplace, the core of what is to be someplace.
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