Objects of My Affection
This series of paintings, Objects of My Affection, is deeply personal – it tells the story of my own struggle to find love and resolution. The impetus to present them as a series (and create an entire catalogue about them) was born in a moment of confession.
Sitting side-by-side with a colleague at lunch, I told her about the specifics of a relationship that had just ended. I told her about the real limitations and the discrepancy between my desires and his.
She was shocked to hear this confession from me. She saw me as a strong, ambitious woman, not someone caught in a relationship with a man she couldn’t create a life with.
And then she told me a strikingly similar story of her own.
It occurred to me then that we were dealing with a phenomenon – a generation of smart, talented and ambitious women struggling to find the right relationship.
I think of these paintings as internal landscapes. As such, they are two things: 1. reliquaries of both sacred and profane moments that make their way in – whether I want them to or not, and 2. states of self-induced chaos, the only way out of which is to let my intuition and instincts guide me into new territory.
I started the first half of this series – Bone White, Pythagoras, I Was Hoping to Take a Walk, Coming into Existence, Space Station, and Parting – nearly two years before I found the courage to end my five-year relationship with The Philosopher. I started thinking about the patterns I've played out and explored my own relationship to the masculine – to space, support, geometry, structure and to what it means to let something in.
A year later, I dropped the abstract in favour of the concrete. One by one I created paintings based on the memories and feelings I’ve been left with from and for five of the men that I’ve loved: Robert (A House Like You), Sterling (The Martyr in Me), Steelee (You Got Hurt), John (I Think You’re Perfect) and Petr (The Philosopher).
The hope was to find catharsis and to shift the way forward.
ARTIST BIO
Jessica Serran is a Visual Artist and the leader of The Becoming Artist Movement. She began her own art-making journey over a decade ago before giving birth to a whole new way of being an artist in the world. Born in Ontario, Canada, she holds an MA in Transformative Art from John F Kennedy University in Berkeley, CA and a BFA in Illustration from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, MI.
Currently living in Prague, CZ and recently named a Leader of the New Cool in Prague, she is founder of the BECOMING, has exhibited and published her work in the Czech Republic, Germany, Slovakia and across North America; been featured in Art 21, The Prague Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Detroit MetroTimes and was a 2014 Creative Mornings guest speaker on the topic of Color.