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LOU, JESSICA

@lou_d_j

481

followers

1998

following

contradictor-ally assembling,
like tectonic plates + an egg shell cracks
artist / writer / art director
@bodyspill

POSTS STORIES REELS TAGGED

these are fragments from making a piece
a visual process defined less by formal outcome
more by conceptual progression
a series of phrases as prompts

1. what have i stored?

BYE, MILK by @lou_d_j

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24 days ago

PUBLIC STORAGE

Will the earth take it back?

@karo.________
@lou_d_j
@quorumquorum
@otherplacesartfair by @lou_d_j

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a month ago

The green
All the green
Everything is green
The floor
That absorbs
Everything

I find two moss eaten boards
Where I made

A place
A lean to
A sit on
A hide under
A wait
A dream

Now a different shade

Darker
Thinner
Holy
Or become one
Or were never two
We find each other there

PUBLIC STORAGE by @lou_d_j

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a month ago

9/19/26 @otherplacesartfair

PUBLIC STORAGE
BYE, MILK
SCAT(TER) PIECE taken in San Pedro, California by @lou_d_j

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2

a month ago

who i am/how i work/and why by @lou_d_j

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1

a month ago

what is on which side
where worlds fall apart
and the new frame begins

thinking about wind-vows

and this is my favorite

@karo.________ @quorumquorum @otherplacesartfair taken in Excideuil, France by @lou_d_j

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a month ago

c’est magnifique, c’est un remède.

@arianareines et Simone Weil dans la paume de ma main, chaque jour, dans l’obscurité, la nuit — et je porte, chaque jour, dans la lumière.

@hanumaneds by @lou_d_j

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2 months ago

where i am from
where i form
walk with me
(after the rain) by @lou_d_j

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2 months ago

"Learning how to sit like a man in an old portrait painting."

I've been digging through my archives and found a sequence of frames I had extracted from a moving work of the past which speaks to my present.

Because space has opened in my life. Because I have left a full-time occupation, because of persons who have left, definite and indefinitely. Persons places things situations - previously all attained and held as load-bearing walls. How do I now hold absence, as presence?

I sat and stared into a familiar river valley which now for ten years I have viewed as a stage, but perhaps more a green room, where I have been filled with clear green moments which carry me from year to year.

I arrived here facing a different direction, due west, sitting on a rock, which among their archipelago, I have come to visit as tiny stone islands, where I rest ashore.

These gestures began where the camera now sits, where my body lie prostrate on the earthen floor, reaching due south, embodying the collapsed feminine from another painting, "Christina's World."

As these sessions do, I begin somewhere planned, and end somewhere new. But oh, how that new keeps on changing. I thought in reaction, as evolution, I chose to embody a storied man with prominence and power, but instead I now see, I was learning how to sit like me.

To the works that keep changing as long as they keep us, that keep us as long as we are changing... by @lou_d_j

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2 months ago

I am her and she is me.

In this first photograph I am free.

Captured with a cardboard box carrying precious film by a precious hand.

When bare souls bare souls, thoughts interwoven, share time–this is the medicine of the universe.

I share this now because it happened again today. And when it happens I remember who I am.

When we sit on sidewalks, looping around the same streets in cars without kids and smoking cigs.

Today on a phone call.

Yesterday taking a walk.

And another walk a week before to a park where we sat and watched our children.

You know who you are.

The next five photos mark a self enclosed loop of unparalleled loss and transition. It is self enclosed because I am cutting the film, marking it, inserting on to its former edge a different frame, and then gluing the other side back down to its "end." I am studying the pain, the shock, the grief, the confusion, the emptiness, the fatigue, and the ambiguity that lies heavy on my face. With curiosity I witness a strangeness and lack of recognition in the tired, the tense, and the age. I share them here in this curated space, where we smooth and blur and erase. I do not wish to erase the fact that I have survived these moments. Each is different, and each is all, and all–is me.

I start with the first to mark a new baseline. This is who I am and where I will always, continue to be.

CAR MIRROR 5

DESK MIRROR 4

CAR MIRROR 3

CAR MIRROR 2

MEDICAL EXAMINER MIRROR 1

I add the last photo, which is the strangest of all. Standing in front of a building where I cannot see or touch an important man who has left his body. I walk up the stairs into the building, I show my identification to a woman sitting in a small dark vestibule shielded by a glass window, I sign a paper she slides underneath and sit in a vinyl chair. Sitting across from me are two older women, holding each other in tears. I walk back over to the shielded woman and ask her if there is a restroom. She points to the back of the room. I get up and walk past the ornate Beaux-Arts stairwell and peer up and down noticing the marble flooring under my feet. I find the bathroom, and I use it. I walk past hand-painted text on a wall that reads, by @lou_d_j

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3 months ago

today i will stop
take time
and sit with you
for everyday you see me
even in my hurried glance
even when
i pass you by
yesterday she said to me
while we looked at the surf
this is god taken in Big Rock Canyon, Malibu by @lou_d_j

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4 months ago

For some reason right now i am reflecting on these moments, seeing my kids be out in the world, and feeling the beauty of the world hold them and carry us through moments of exploration, question and incertitude. It is in the tiniest of perceptible details, the timber of a hue, the illumination of a momentary light, vapor in the air, the wind as it wraps around an entire island, the weighted hum of the ocean's rhythm that overrides all – that creates a soundless all the rest absorbed into ancient silky black sand that rests at the bottom of a prehistoric valley – and my breath, the only thing loud in my ear amidst this vastness; and then I hear the subtle presence of distant human echos interspersed with the sounds of 50 year old "fresh" rock that cracks beneath our many feet – the sun, the heat, the sweat, the thirst, the fatigue, the small bottle of water that we share together. by @lou_d_j

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5 months ago