Portfolio | Jacinda Russell

Statement

I photograph worn, dilapidated objects with histories that express loss and sadness. These forms are ultimately self-portraits, communicating to the viewer significant memories that I am unwilling to let go. Spring 2010 featured several personal and career-related disappointments, and for the first time in my artistic life I devoted myself to a project whose main premise is beauty, escapism, and desire. Complete immersion in finding inviting bodies of water to float Styrofoam and acrylic-tinted, caulk cakes was a coping mechanism for coming to terms with loneliness and unhappiness with place. Cakes—both real and fake—appeared to make people happy and I wondered, most simply, if they could make me happy too.

Two of the most desired objects in twentieth-century art are Wayne Thiebaud’s thickly textured paintings of desserts and Ed Ruscha’s photographs of azure swimming pools. I sought ways of combining them, creating a mixed-media spectacle of performance art, sculpture, and photography. I chose the number nine in homage to Ruscha’s famous photo-essay Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass, expanding the locations to include not just artificial pools of water but natural springs, the ocean, freshwater lakes, and rivers.

I didn’t stray too far from the concept of object as self-portrait. Slice depicts the part of me I left home in the Pacific Northwest (as photographed in the Canadian Southwest) when I moved to Indiana. Desert Sun captures one of the happiest times in my life in one of my favorite places (Tucson, Arizona) while 3-tier, photographed at Niagara Falls, acknowledges one of the saddest. The cake deemed Little Great Lakes, the smallest of them all, shows an underlying determinism and hope as it bravely faces the incoming waves, only to be toppled time and time again.

The process of producing the photographs and the performances that ensued during the flotations are nearly as important as the images themselves. An artist’s book will soon be published documenting all aspects of the process.

Despite its formal beauty, Nine Fake Cakes and Nine Bodies of Water comes from a dark place—one that was momentarily forgotten as I traveled across the country searching for pristine water. I returned with a product that comments on the illusion of what is fake and what is real, what is happy and what is sad, and what is desired but unattainable.

In the summer of 2011 as part of the project From Venice Beach to the Venice Biennale, I sent the nine photographs to Ruscha in California. He responded with a card replying, “Those cakes never had it so good and neither did those bodies of water.” I created a new set of postcards complete with his “approval” and brought them to the Venice Biennale. I could not bring myself to float them in unclear water and proceeded to take water samples across northern Italy until I found the ideal location. In Monterosso al Mare, I tucked the laminated cards into my swimsuit and swam out to a rock barrier. I threw them one by one into the Mediterranean Sea and watched as they floated slowly back to the shore. The only documentation of this event is a photograph taken after the fact, of the scrapes on my left shin and right foot from the rock barrier. I would spend the rest of the summer attempting to live up to Ruscha’s salutation, “Rage on.”

Bio

Jacinda Russell is an artist and educator.  When she isn’t teaching at Ball State University as an Assistent Professor of Photography, she can be found traveling and visiting earthworks. www.jacindarussell.com