Jessiena Lake is a photographic, stop-motion and mixed-media visual artist using color to explore identity, imagination, research and play as systems of meaning-making. Through the construction of props, miniature sets, and graphic, color-driven imagery, her work investigates the emotional and symbolic weight of constructed environments and how acts of making become a method of processing experience.
The Latest explores the spectrum of this artist’s experience being a late diagnosed autistic woman and the evolving process of creating order and expression. There is deep ritual in being neurodivergent, in processing the happiness of a future ahead, the grief of a life passed and in accepting your unique traits, while releasing internal and external ableism.
After my grandmother passed away, her North Dakota garden disappeared beneath years of weeds. After my grandfather passed and I had a garden of my own, my mother and I returned to dig up what remained. We dug unknown roots and bulbs from the overgrown earth that remembered my grandmother’s garden. We drove them eight hours to Minnesota over several trips, planted them, and waited. During that time, I discovered an album my grandmother had made documenting the garden she loved in sometimes blurry and out of focus images, lovingly archived in a photo album kept in her nightstand. Pairing her photographs with her flowers that continue to bloom today, this series explores legacy, memory and our connection through time and place.
TONES is a lived stop motion and photography series exploring color through daily life. For seven days, I lived one color each day through what I ate, wore, listened to and how I moved, creating monochromatic meals and outfits, listening to color-inspired music, practicing chakra yoga and exploring how other artists use color.
Originally lived one day at a time from December 26, 2020 through January 1, 2021, the project plays with the many meanings of its title: it’s monotones on tones on tones.
Chasing Clouds is a long exposure photographic exploration of Minnesota's giant roadside attractions, those larger-than-life icons that live in the collective memory of Minnesotans. Just as clouds move across the sk and the camera’s sensor, so too do memories, morphing and transforming within our consciousness.