Archive Jessica Bronson

Interview by Anoka Farquee | Interview by Shirley Tse | Interview by Benjamin Weissman | Jessica Bronson Home Page | Fall 2007 Archive

Project Series 33: Jessica Bronson
September 4 - October 21, 2007

	Jessica Bronson perpetual perceptual (speculative spectrum) 2006 Seven light emitting diodes, integrated circuits and microchip housed in steel casing

Jessica Bronson is at the forefront of a generation of artists who use video to explore the history of film, installation strategies, narrative meaning, and sculptural practice. For over fifteen years, Bronson has created videos, moving-image installations, and, more recently, and on view here, LED-based text works that use images of nature and landscapes as a means to explore issues of mediation, representation, and subjectivity.

Mediation resides at the core of Bronson’s practice. Since the early 1990s, her work has oscillated between representations of the real and the artificial and confounded real time and cinematic time to create new perceptual experiences of everyday natural phenomenon. In her earlier work, Bronson typically combined and manipulated images and sound from thousands of frames of appropriated films, as well as her own footage of shots of natural subjects—such as clouds, flowers, trees, rivers, landscapes—in a series of video works that often use special effects to explore representation and perception.

For this exhibition, Bronson presents work that explores these issues in a new media—LED text pieces—and that continues to address her fascination with mediated experiences of nature. The works on view—perpetual perceptual (speculative spectrum) and for Helen Keller (both 2006)—reflect her ongoing interest in linking science and art practice, in particular the science of perception. They consist of moving text installations that employ the phenomena of retinal painting, in which one sees the image peripherally, or when one is not looking directly at the source. Emitting words and sentence fragments from sources related to color theory and perception, each body of work addresses a specific instance, phrase, or idea. For example, perpetual perceptual (speculative spectrum) references both Newton’s and Goethe’s investigations of color perception with red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet text that flashes “an incidental result for/of an elemental principle.” A work about color and its absence, for Helen Keller is an all white LED that flashes “remain colorless,” referencing both Helen Keller and the culmination of the color spectrum.

Both works play with the transient, sensory experiences of perception and contemplation, where image resides as idea and idea represents image, creating a host of associations that Bronson artfully encourages. For Bronson, the poetic conflating of text/image/idea points to the nature of consciousness and perception, and the role of subjectivity in shaping experience, and therefore, meaning.

Jessica Bronson’s exhibition is the thirty-third in the Pomona College Museum of Art’s Project Series, an ongoing program of focused exhibitions that brings to the Pomona College campus art that is experimental and that introduces new forms, techniques, or concepts.

Rebecca McGrew
Curator