When I walked into Jess Levey's studio, I was excited to see several videos set up and playing. An iPad showed black and white documentation of a simple performance involving a woman in an office chair in a cubicle pushing herself back and forth relentlessly between the walls of the cubicle (After the Crash Project, Untitled #4). On the wall was a quieter image made from a photo collage with a video projected on top. The still image looks like a factory courtyard. In the middle of the courtyard, the projection layers an image of a field of grass fluttering in the wind. I think these two works illustrate the range of Jess's work. From works with a direct and concrete message, to works that seem more poetic and mysterious.
Jess works primarily with photo/video collage these days, but her roots are in photography. She showed me some of the early photographs, which involved projections upon objects and people. The photographs were very dramatically staged and well executed.
As we talked, I learned about the project that seemed to move Jess into collage and to focus on the manipulation of images in a somewhat analog manner. After the many lay-offs of 2008, she and many of her friends would never return to the buildings they spent years entering every day. She took footage of the neighborhoods where people had worked and asked them to use paint to black out the building in which they had once spent so much of their time. I like the idea of using a moving image to create a two dimensional mark on paper. The message Jess began with is very literal, but watching the video of each person blacking out their building, this mark-making seems like a quiet action, almost a ritual. (Look under Videos at http://www.jesslevey.com/)
Most of Jess's installations and videos address our interactions with everyday spaces. Her motivations are political in some instances, but I also think the works move into the universal when you encounter them. There is an emptiness in the bleak images of urban spaces, but the projections and drawings transform the spaces. Perhaps she is questioning our perceptions of our surroundings too.
We also discussed the idea of video collage. I like that Jess is combining the physical and virtual in her collages. It's refreshing to see someone using technology as a tool and incorporating it into a unique process. The process is perhaps closer to printmaking than to video. Impressions are formed in paper to create spaces for projections to exist and impressions are made using the projections as a guide.
As I moved through the studio, Jess showed me a more recent piece that took the quiet and mysterious aspect of her work further. A small black and white photo of a desert scene sits on the wall. Behind a tree, a trail of smoke is moving up into the sky. I chose this work for the exhibition, because the scale is surprising for a video collage and it reveals itself slowly and beautifully.
You can see Jess's work here: http://www.jesslevey.com/
