Jess Curtis

Combining sculpture with digital media, I create reiterations of a ring that my late grandmother once owned. Each iteration evidences various levels of abstraction, with the intent of toying with notions of ambiguity and concealment. An intentional erasure of contextual information aims to allow the viewer to make judgements about the physical and digital objects presented to them based only on the visual information they are given. This reduction of contextual information in conjunction with visual abstraction aims to create distance between the viewer and the work, thus asserting my agency as an artist celebrating an object that I honour as sacred. The lines between artist and archaeologist blur in my practice; although I identify my grandmother’s ring with someone I have lost, I simultaneously identify it with something I have found: a body of work that identifies with growth, rebirth, and transmutation of artifactual incarnations, each products of appropriation that hold their own respective philosophies.