ABOUT THE PROJECT
FIELD GUIDE TO THE CZECH PSYCHE
Prague-based Canadian artist Jessica Serran spent two and a half years walking the “field” and trying to answer the questions, “What does it mean to be from a particular place, and how does that place affect your sense of self?”
The project has particular relevance to Serran given her Czechoslovak ancestry, her interest in how the past both shapes and informs the present, and her work as a psycho-cartographer. Based on a series of nine interviews with Czech citizens and the collection of personal photographs that each participant provided, Serran delves into these questions and responds to them visually, weaving together thoughts, stories and gathered images in landscapes that map out this terrain where identity meets place and the past meets the present.
In an excerpt from the book, Serran writes:
“As paintings, these images piece together the fragments that I took to be essential to each individual. Sometimes they do this carefully, and quite literally, other times loosely and metaphorically. Occasionally, what one person told me made its way into the painting for another. They are neither illustrations, nor traditional landscape paintings, nor are they portraits. They are evidence of what happens when we let alien elements in and how the field changes when we enter it. They depend on paradox, tension and the presence of an “other.” These are paintings about Czech people, yes, but more than that they are an opportunity to meander through the landscape of the psyche – both your own and those of our dear participants, and perhaps while doing so gain a better sense of where you are now standing and how you came to be here.”
ARTIST BIO
Jessica Serran is an Artist, Psycho-Cartographer and founder of the BECOMING - an online educational platform for artists. Over the past 15 years, she has used drawing and painting to make visible and give physical form to the parts of self that often remain hidden and hardest to touch – memory, trauma, the past, identity, desire. Like picking at scabs, she creates images that touch the wounded and sensitive, overlooked and oft-forgotten parts of the psyche. She believes that it is in touching these places and diving into the darkness that we find the metaphorical gold.
Working as a Psycho-Cartographer she has been found amongst Latino Day Labourers and residents of Oakland, California asking questions about place and personal experience; creating a dialogue between artists and their audience at the Urban Institute of Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids Michigan, and exploring identity and place in the land of her ancestors – the Czech Republic. Her most recent project, Field Guide to the Czech Psyche, examines the intersecting points where history, culture, nationality and identity in a post-communist landscape converge in the psyche of its people.
Her approach to ethnography has been called revolutionary. Recently named a Leader of the New Cool in Prague, she has exhibited and published her work in the Czech Republic and throughout North America and been featured in Art 21, Lidové Noviny, expats.cz and The Prague Post.
Supporters of her work have included the Ontario Arts Council, the Arts and Theatre Institute of Prague, CESTA – the Cultural Exchange Station of Tábor, CZ, the Detroit Society of Women Painters and Sculptors, the California Institute of Integral Studies, and a myriad of backers through a highly successful Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign that helped bring the Field Guide to the Czech Psyche to press.
