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 sensory experiences and embodied perceptions are invisible to us but ultimately they dictate the way we create meaning and understand the world.
I found a model for my exploration of perception in Avant-garde structural film and I apply its principles in my work by using visual and material manipulations to call attention to perceptual assumptions. Perceptual abstraction also influences my work in 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, my subject matter typically involves familiar representational forms from the environment like plants or electric power lines. 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. Philosophers, artists, and scientists have convincingly illustrated how lens-based images do not replicate human vision, and more alarmingly that increasing familiarity with lens-based images fundamentally alters our mental conception of form, space, and how we see.[2] Now that digital imagery, digital interfaces, and digital environments have become 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.
[2] Notably addressed by David Hockney and Charles M. Falco in a number of publications since 2000, and Walter Benjamin in the essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility, 1936.
BIOGRAPHY
Jessica Larva was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and currently lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. She earned her BFA (2002) and MFA (2005) in new media art at Ohio State University.
Larva has exhibited across the country including notable exhibitions such as her solo shows Leeward at the College of Southern Nevada in Las Vegas (2017) and Fluid Horizons at Ohio Dominican University (2013), group exhibitions Monochrome at the Manifest Gallery (Ohio, 2017), iDEAS at the Laird-Norton Center (Minnesota, 2016), 64 at the Buchanan Center for the Arts (Illinois, 2015), Sky High at the Riffe Gallery and Southern Ohio Portsmouth Museum (2014), Botanicals at the Kiernan Gallery (Virginia, 2013) Photo Plus at the Jacob Jarvits Center (New York, 2003), two-person installation Inscription (Ohio, 2011), video screening at Mission Art Walk (Texas, 2007) and at the Wexner Center (Ohio, 2005). Additionally Larva co-curated Tracing Lines at the Urban Art Space (Ohio, 2012) and curated numerous new media exhibitions in her role as exhibition chair of the not-for- profit arts organization Fuse Factory.
Larva was formerly the studio assistant for artist Ann Hamilton and a founding member of Fuse Factory. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Art, Media, and Design at DePaul University.
