ARTIST STATEMENT & BIOGRAPHY
STATEMENT
My artwork focuses on visual perception. My questions involve the relationship between sensory data gathered from the external world and internal cognitive and corporeal elements that result in visual perception. How do formal visual elements and lens-based or digital technologies affect perception? How do the interplay of the physical structures of our brains and bodies, along with the complex framework of our conscious and unconscious, create and shape individual perception? These questions are crucial because the impact of our individual experiences and embodied perceptions are invisible to us but ultimately they dictate the way we create meaning and understand the world.
I draw from phenomenological and neurophenomenological philosophy in my approach as well as contemporary theory in neuropsychology, which indicates that basic processes of the unconscious such as perception and memory are inaccessible to conscious awareness. Since the unconscious cannot be examined directly, it must be accessed in another way. I found a model for my exploration of perception in Avant-garde structural film, and apply many of its concerns and principles to my work. Perceptual abstraction is another dominant influence in my work for its ability to “introduce us to [our unconscious selves] by surprising us into consciousness of mental activities of which we are otherwise unaware.”[1] Unlike the perceptual abstraction movement and many contemporary perceptual artists, my subject matter typically involves familiar representational forms. This choice acknowledges that the evolution of human perception is directly related to the advantage of interpreting elements in one’s environment and this context continues to impact how we perceive.
The influence of optical technology on perception is of particular concern to me both in terms of my conceptual inquiry and in my formal practice, which utilizes lens-based and digital-optics devices. My work typically takes the form of large-scale prints of digital compositions, digital video projection, and installation. Lens-based images do not replicate human vision and more alarmingly, increasing familiarity with these images fundamentally alters our mental conception of form, space, and how we see. Now that digital imagery and digital tools are ubiquitous in daily life they are also shaping our cognition and perception in ways we cannot yet fully appreciate.
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[1] Dave Hickey Trying to See What We Can Never Know, Forward essay in Optic Nerve: Perceptual art of the 1960s, 2007.
BIOGRAPHY
Jessica Larva was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and currently lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. She earned her BFA and MFA in new media art at Ohio State University.
Larva’s artwork has been exhibited in notable exhibitions including solo shows From Where I Stand in Riley Hall Gallery at the University of Notre Dame, Leeward at the College of Southern Nevada in Las Vegas, and Fluid Horizons at Ohio Dominican University. Other recent exhibitions include Abstract Catalyst at Verum Ultimum Gallery in Oregon, Digital Alchemy through Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, Flourish at the d’Art Center in Virginia, Insight at the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Massachusetts, Inhabit and also Monochrome at the Manifest Gallery in Ohio, iDEAS at the Laird-Norton Center in Minnesota, 64 at the Buchanan Center for the Arts in Illinois, Sky High at the Riffe Gallery and Southern Ohio Portsmouth Museum, Botanicals at the Kiernan Gallery in Virginia, Photo Plus at the Jacob Jarvits Center in New York, two-person installation Inscription in Wehrle Gallery in Ohio, video screening at Mission Art Walk in Texas, and video screening at the Wexner Center in Ohio. Additionally, Larva co-curated Tracing Lines at the Urban Art Space in Ohio and curated numerous new media exhibitions in her role as exhibition chair of the not-for-profit arts organization Fuse Factory. Larva is the publication designer for Making Way, a young-adult novel.
Larva was formerly the studio assistant for artist Ann Hamilton and a founding member of Fuse Factory electronic and digital art lab. She is currently an Associate Professor in The Art School at DePaul University.