Drawing Capitalism Print

Jennifer Jones-O’Neil is a Miami based artist and photographer working in a variety of media including photography, digital tools, collage and painting. What Drives Me to Create? I create for self-discovery and personal growth, producing work as a way to search for new knowledge while conscious of the public sphere that surrounds me. It is within this public sphere that I am interested in discovering how spatialized power manifests within cultural constructs, economic class structure, and an increasing global consumer culture, but the work is not necessarily finding a solution but activating a conversation around why it exists. I reassign material objects and its use-value; employing some of the same devices of advertising to investigate how we negotiate the meaning and power of images. This restructuring is done to create ambiguity and to re-organize its meaning because as consumers we are affected by mass media images and places of material objects, if meaning is acquired when images are consumed, viewed and interpreted, it is at this point, I am interested in how that meaning invokes social and political value through different cultural contexts. I am inspired by the daily news, dark satire, psychoanalysis, capitalism, consumer culture and the discovery and ever evolving self-identity. Collage Series: An Evangelical Art Machine The following experimental work has been inspired by Chuck Palahniuk's Invisible Monsters, Banksy, Lacan, the gaze of the lens, the substrate, the object, the viewer, and the voyeuristic gaze. Inspiration for this work questions texts as metacodes for images and images as metacodes for texts. As I wander through real and digital space and the places in between collecting data through haptic touch and peripheral unfocused vision, I hope to mutilate this work into something else. Shape Shifters In the series Shape Shifters, I am exploring questions about how we create self-identity through the purchase and use of material objects. If portrait photography is understood to not only, capture the person’s physical likeness, in which the face and expression is predominant, but something of the person’s character, then what deeper connotations and denotations can come from covering the face? The coverings or material objects belong to the sitter.