Jane Waggoner Deschner
November 15 to December 24, 2008
Opening Reception Nov. 15, 2008 6-9 PM
BIO
Jane Waggoner Deschner is an artist whose medium is the vernacular photograph. Facilitated by increasingly sophisticated digital technology and the age-old art of needle-in-hand, she explores new ways of understanding these ubiquitous, but often overlooked, products of mass culture.
Currently her work is traveling throughout Montana and Wyoming as part of their ArtMobile programs that bring original, contemporary art to under-served rural areas. Opened January 2008, her work was included in “Speaking Volumes: Transforming Hate,” a national juried exhibition organized by Helena, Montana’s Holter Museum of Art and the Montana Human Rights Network; it will travel until spring 2011. She was selected for the thematic artist residency, “Making Artistic Inquiry Visible,” at The Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada, spring 2008. In May 2008 she was appointed to the Montana Arts Council. In 2006, she co-authored and designed the book, Artists-In-Residence: The Creative Center’s Approach to Arts in Healthcare with The Creative Center in New York City.
Deschner earned her Master of Fine Arts in Visual Art from Vermont College in February 2002. In addition to creating her own artwork, she founded MIXX, an artists’ collaborative, and works as a curator, gallery director at Rocky Mountain College, consultant in arts in healthcare, coordinator of large public art projects, and is a free-lancer in graphic design. Her work is in the collections of Federal Reserve Banks in Minneapolis, MN and Helena, MT; University of Montana; Montana State University–Billings Foundation; Yellowstone Public Radio; Nicolaysen Art Museum, Casper, WY; Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts, Helena, MT; and private collections across the United States and in South Korea.
STATEMENT
For over twenty-five years, I have utilized found photographic images in my artmaking — found on magazine pages, they were the material of cut-and-paste photomontages. During graduate school, I became fascinated with vernacular photography, especially in its most ubiquitous (and human) form, the found photograph. Since 2001, I have collected, studied and manipulated mid-Twentieth Century snapshots and studio portraits, working to uncover what these records of reality can teach me about our essential humanity. I’ve created over a dozen series, nearly five hundred artworks. When we look at snapshots that are two, three and four generations old, what is obvious is what has changed. But, when we look into them — we discover what has remained constant. We are reminded of how we are to one another.
Virtually everyone takes snapshots — and has for well over a hundred years. Orphaned photos, taken by unknown photographers, are rich and fascinating in their representations of commonality. I belong to the legions who have posed with my babies, snapped birthday parties, memorialized fish caught and recorded the aging of loved ones. I believe that these kinds of photographs speak to and about all of us.
The snapshot (is) the form of photography that is most defined by love. People take them out of love, and they take them to remember — people, places, times. They’re about creating a history by recording a history.
Nan Goldin, I’ll be Your Mirror, 1996
The camera records an image dispassionately, mechanically — everything is equally important. By cropping, enlarging, rearranging, cleaning, selecting, covering and/or juxtaposing, I enhance content and suggest to the viewer other, perhaps more poetic, interpretations. In my untitled underneath series, the focus of the
snapshot is hidden under a densely-colored geometric shape leaving the viewer to speculate on the subject of the photograph. the lamp and uncover an unintended quirk of the photographer or the subjects. In the double exposure series, I combine two photos, each of which had been taken by one the participants, in order to include everyone in the same image.
When I work with snapshots, I search for commonaly. Taking a different tack in the recent untitled maxims series, I hand-embroider quotes, aphorisms and sayings of the famous into studio portraits of the unknown, movie stills and new photos. Mingling the images of some with the words of others, I can moralize on ways I believe everyone (whom I’ve come to love through snapshots) should think and live. One recent focus of this series is war&peace — comments on what has become an unending, expensive and futile effort in Iraq. Another is based in “I” and “you” statements and offers “lessons for living.”
Every photograph is a certificate of presence.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 1980
We all snap photos of people and things we love and times we want to remember. In a studio, we hire a professional to immortalize us looking our best. When a photograph’s intent and appearance is altered, the viewer is invited to deduce, speculate and fantasize. There are many ways to appreciate a common photograph — even those of people, places and times we never knew.
EXHIBITIONS
Jane Waggoner Deschner
November 15 to December 24, 2008
Opening Reception Nov. 15, 2008 6-9 PM
