Jessica Cebra
Jessica Cebra, from southern California, graduated from the Corcoran College of Art + Design in 2006, and lived and worked in the Washington, D.C. area until the end of 2017. She also studied Library and Archival Science, and Historic Preservation at the University of Maryland which has inspired themes of permanence and ephemerality, preservation and loss, in her work. Jessica had her first solo exhibition at Transformer in 2013-14 and participated in the Sister Cities grant trip to Rome in 2016. She is now based in Southern California.
The Featherweight collage series is a visual exploration of a profound mythological concept and symbol I recently learned about-- The feather of Ma’at is an ostrich feather, an Egyptian symbol for Truth. At the time of death, the Goddess Ma’at would weigh the heart of the deceased against the weight of the feather to see whether the person had lived a just life. One of my favorite artists, Manuel de Arce, was a family friend here in the Coachella Valley desert when I was a child. He gifted many of his lithographs to us, imagery in colored pencil depicting marine life and artifacts inhabiting surreal desert landscapes. A few years ago I learned about his death and recently found some of the lithographs including a scene of feathers floating through the desert sky. I immediately felt called to incorporate his imagery of feathers into new collages I was working on. Most of the other imagery in this series is drawn from old art books and magazines I acquired from estate sales. All fragments extracted from things left behind by those who have passed on. My collages continue to be a rumination about what we assign value to, the heaviness of what we carry, what we give our attention and energy to, what we can release, and what really matters in the face of the great beyond, the vast unknown? Is there a way to lighten the load before reaching that portal.”
Complementary to my previous Waterworld series of paintings, these photographs represent the return to my first home in the desert lands. My Futures video for Transformer’s Evoking the Senses exhibition and programming conveys my mirroring of the vast ocean and remote desert. I find myself going full circle and returning to my early love of analog photography and film processing. The 35mm film I shot was pre-soaked in “film soup” chemistry allowing organic shapes and waving lines to interact with the captured imagery. Together they evoke otherworldly or underwater scenes with whimsical plant-life. I hope my images can inspire efforts to conserve and protect the desert lands.
In the form of undulating mountains, flat mesas, and wide valleys, the desert embodies both fragility and resilience. My hometown and nearby destinations like Joshua Tree and Anza Borrego have been bustling with seasonal visitors so I’ve found myself seeking quietude on less traveled trails. Perpetually humbled by extreme desert conditions and the magical beauty of my surroundings, I’ve likened my recent experiences in the ocean with my current time being below sea level on the desert floor. It’s not so difficult to imagine that there was once water here and marine life. The desert has become my ocean floor.
