The Latest Exhibition + Programming

The Latest is a multimedia photography and stop-motion series exploring my experience as a late-diagnosed autistic woman and the evolving process of creating order and then expression. There is deep ritual in being neurodivergent: in processing the happiness of a future ahead, grief for a life passed by, accepting unique traits, and releasing internal and external ableism.

As an autistic artist who thinks in richly detailed images, I have spent my life trying to materialize my internal visual world. Photography allows me to communicate more clearly than I can verbally, and visual language allows me to share what I cannot always say.

The project moves through three interconnected forms: Monochromatic Calibrations, Symbolic Still Lifes, and Release images. Together they move through order, expression, and release, while recurring objects and visual motifs create patterns and play within the work.

Stop-motion is embedded throughout the project. Calibrations assemble and disassemble, Symbolic Still Lifes move, and acts of Release unfold frame by frame. The project also exists as a photobook, bringing these interconnected images together in another physical form and the photobook exists as a video book our with embedded stop motion that brings the pages to life.

Exhibition Possibilities

The Latest is intentionally flexible and scalable, allowing the work to respond to the architecture, audience, and resources of an exhibition space.

Individual photographic works can be exhibited as framed prints, while groups of images or individual stop-motion sequences can expand across a wall as framed photographic installations.

A Monochromatic Calibration can exist as a single completed photograph, as moving image, or as a collection of individual frames. A Release can similarly be experienced as a single photograph, an animation, or as a frame-by-frame progression across physical space.

This movement between still and moving image also allows The Latest to explore time. A late diagnosis does not change the life already lived, but it can reframe our understanding of that life, altering how the past is interpreted, how the present is processed, and how the future is imagined. Similarly, the individual photographs that create a stop-motion work remain unchanged while their meaning and experience shift depending on how they are ordered, connected, and encountered through time.

Photography, stop-motion, installation, and the photobook can operate together within the exhibition, creating a multimedia experience of time, order, expression, assembly, disassembly, and release.

Exhibition format and accompanying programming can be adapted to the venue, audience, accessibility needs, available space, and resources.

Participatory Installation

Release: What Are You Ready to Let Go?

The Release images within The Latest use fire as a ritualized way of releasing harmful language associated with internal and external ableism.

In this participatory extension of the work, visitors are invited to consider language that has affected their own lives.

What have you been told about yourself that you no longer want to carry?

What expectation are you ready to release?

What words have stayed with you longer than they deserved?

Visitors can anonymously write a word, phrase, expectation, or statement on a piece of paper and physically destroy it using a hand-crank paper shredder.

Unlike the photographic Release works, which preserve my own act of release as an image, visitors' contributions are not archived or displayed. The words themselves disappear.

The slow physical action of operating the hand-crank shredder transforms release into a deliberate act. Participants decide what to write, whether to share it with anyone, and when they are ready to destroy it.

Participation is always optional, and visitors may engage with the installation privately and at their own pace.

Artist Talk

Visual Language: Making an Internal World Visible

In this artist talk, Jessiena Lake discusses the creation of The Latest and the experience of developing a visual language for ideas and experiences she cannot always communicate verbally.

The talk explores late autistic diagnosis, masking, autistic culture and communication, ritual and repetition, internal and external ableism, and the ways photography, stop motion, color, humor, play, familiar objects, and visual metaphor can communicate complex experiences.

The conversation also considers what playful art can do. Bright colors, toys, games, miniature objects, and humor can create accessible entry points into subjects that are difficult, painful, or unfamiliar without diminishing their seriousness.

Rather than asking audiences to already possess a particular vocabulary for understanding autistic experience, The Latest uses familiar visual material as an invitation into a different way of experiencing and communicating with the world.

Artist Talk + Community Conversation

Who Gets to Access Art?

The Latest can also provide a starting point for a broader conversation about access, not only physical access to arts spaces, but cultural, financial, sensory, intellectual, and social access.

What makes someone feel that an arts space is meant for them?

What assumptions do arts institutions make about how visitors should behave, communicate, interpret, or participate?

Can color, humor, play, familiar objects, plain language, and multiple ways of experiencing artwork create additional entry points?

Drawing from her experiences as an autistic artist, working photographer, art student, exhibiting artist, arts grant reviewer, and arts-community participant, Jessiena discusses accessibility as part of how art is made, communicated, exhibited, and experienced.

The format can be adapted as an artist talk, moderated conversation, or community discussion according to the interests of the host organization.

Multimedia Experience

Because The Latest exists across still photography, stop motion, physical installation, and the photobook, audiences can encounter the same visual ideas in different ways.

A visitor might first see a completed Calibration as a photograph, then watch its objects assemble one at a time through stop motion animation video.

A Release might appear as a single frozen moment in one part of the exhibition and unfold frame by frame elsewhere via stop motion or each frame printed and framed.

Objects first encountered within elaborate Symbolic Still Lifes can reappear hidden in orderly monochromatic inventories creating a system of play within the project.

The photobook allows visitors to experience these relationships through sequence and page-turning, while moving image introduces duration and physical installations expand those sequences into gallery space.

These forms are not separate additions to the photographic series. Together, they reflect one of the central ideas within The Latest: the same individual pieces can take on different meaning when they are reordered, recontextualized, and understood through new information.

An Invitation to Experience a Different Visual Language

The Latest began as a deeply personal exploration to understand my own life after being awarded my autistic diagnosis in midlife.

But the project is also about communication.

It asks what happens when someone who has spent a lifetime translating herself into other people's language instead begins communicating through her own.

Through photography, stop motion, color, play, conversation, and participation, an exhibition of The Latest invites audiences not simply to learn about autistic experience, but to spend time inside the visual language of one autistic artist.