Imagemaking Artist Statement

Jessica Dillon

Weaknesses:

1. The complexity of ideas I conjure tend to outweigh what I am capable of achieving through the medium.
2. I have little experience with artificial lighting, so I tend to utilize natural light.
3. I shoot in a very experimental manner, providing ample variety in my images, I then struggle with the editing process, as I sometimes have too much to choose from.

Strengths:

1. Good sense of composition.
2. Fairly good technical skill with the camera.
3. Interesting and thought provoking ideas.

Statement

When imagemaking, my subject matter tends to be extremely varied. Usually, my ideas are driven conceptually, then translated visually. The concept usually dictates what subject matter I will be working with. During this process, I tend to experiment a lot with point of view and depth of field, thus resulting in a wide variety of material to choose from. My images tend to be very serious. Throughout these experiments all of my work has been of this nature, with the exception of magical realism, which humor through exaggeration was simply part of the assignment. I really enjoyed the wunderkammer assignment, as I was able to experiment with different mediums to achieve a very conceptually driven “collection,” then translating it to photography. This gave me great insight into ways of using photography as a tool in my explorations through other mediums. Most of my work is compositionally strong, as my images usually are centered on a specific subject. The compositional approaches I repeatedly employ are radial and axial, I would like to experiment more with modular and transitional approaches. In general, my content varies in color, scale, and texture. I think I could improve upon the utilization of tone in my images.