Bio:

Jessica Holmes creates images that straddle between the public and private with the candy colored sardonic skew that comes from a youth spent “stifled and feeling outside of myself” in Newport Beach.

After graduating from high school, Jessica moved to the Bay area determined to study political science and haphazardly enrolled in a photography class. At the City College of San Francisco, she began assisting her instructor, Lon Clark, with his work and so began a mentor relationship “that changed my life” according to Holmes. In photography, “I found out who I was by making images, I found magic in a language that is without words.” Inspired by the works of Mondrian, Ralph Gibson, Laszlo Moholy Nagy, Jan Sudek, Manet and Man Ray, she found a new way to communicate.

At the California College of Arts and Crafts, Holmes “felt freedom, an allowing to become, looking within instead of out”. The distance stimulated her perspective and it became clear that growing up in a Barbie strip mall culture, “my ideas were never really my ideas. They were superimposed by my social landscape…’Okay, this is the way I’m supposed to think’, yet I always felt like an outsider in my environment.” Her photos have come to explore “solitude and the circumstances of that, the duality of how women experience themselves, ‘who I am to you is who I make myself out to be’, that’s like living in the mirror, any moment we share that doesn’t dissolve.”

A participant, an instigator, a voyeur, Jessica finds inspiration in the quotidian (“I like a sing-a-long, I like to pet other people’s dogs, I like a simple gesture, a knowing look, nakedness, exposure, it could be between two people in a supermarket,.”) and the debauched glamour of Los Angeles, the tacit erotic politics etched in “chipped light pink nail polish”. She now lives in Los Feliz, California, with her cat, Francis.

---

Little miss statement:

How is a unique experience evaluated and defined in our present culture?

My motif is predicated on the idea of cerebral feminity. The relationship a woman has with herself, the environment which surrounds her and how she is perceived in her environment.
The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. The way we see things is influenced by what we realize and what we suppose. We see what we look at; it is an act of choice. Never are we looking at just one thing. We are looking at the relation between ourselves and what we see. When we see we become aware that we can also be seen. Images can show how something or someone had once looked and thus how other people had once seen the subject.

I am interested in the exploration of an idea from every angle. I am not interested in sameness. While putting together this show, I realized that it would be artistically without integrity if I were to show a series of images whose body felt, aesthetically the same. Most of the images presented today are about women and, in one way or another, are about myself. Intentionally each woman stands out against her environment. She becomes the surface, the texture, the moment, the impression, the impartial vision, or the deliberate object. Her role is defined by the observer’s personal association with the image. Without the spectator there is no discourse. Although I make a few suggestions, this is an attempt to explain either literally or metaphorically how ‘you see things’ or how ‘he sees things’ or how ‘I see things’. These images are a collection of thoughts on a number of subjects. You are free to draw your own conclusions. They are a set of appearances, captured and recorded.