Artist's Statement
Figurative art has traditionally sought to create unified worldviews and suggest universal truths about the human condition. Jeff Hesser is both attracted by and doubtful of these attempts. As he researches the impossibility of really grasping the past, and the veiled relationship between the past and the present, his work reflects both the desire and difficulty of the search for meaning. Hesser is drawn to themes and figures that hover between evocations of presence and absence, certainty and doubt, clarity and confusion. Throughout the working process he moves more deeply into a theme or idea as he searches for the appropriate narrative, formal and gestural resolutions to issues that he encounters
In Hesser’s sculpture of Narcissus, he looked for a formal and compositional vocabulary to express the ideas originally found in the Greek myth and further explored by twentieth century psychology. While working to create a figure with whom the viewer could empathize, he also distanced the figure from the viewer by tying him in a knot and placing him within the rhetorical context of nineteenth century romantic naturalism.
In his Childhood Series, drawings and sculptures of babies and children appear to be seen through a dense fog or veil and smooth transitions echo a distant memory or clear and crisp forms. In these images and objects, Hesser is interested in how time moves in a loop between present and past. While drawing and sculpting, Hesser looks at childhood photographs and at himself in the mirror. Through inserting the forms of his adult body into the image of himself as a child, he searches for formal and narrative ways to blur the boundaries between past and present.
Hesser’s work based on sleepwalking allows him to explore other kinds of ambiguity. Sleepwalkers move into two worlds at the same time. While their bodies walk through and interact with the physical world, their minds move through worlds of imagination, dream and nightmare. This state of being interests him because it reverses the narrative of traditional, monumental figurative art in which figures are usually depicted as still and mentally present rather than in motion and absent. He is also interested in the potential use of sleepwalking as an allegory or metaphor for the contemporary state of American culture.
Sculptures and drawings of old couples give Hesser the opportunity to explore the stages in life in which the body and mind exist at various levels of presence and absence. By focusing on couples, he is also able to experiment with different kinds of reliance and interdependence, or the ways in which one can both lose oneself and find oneself in the presence of another.
In the drawings from the China Diaries Series, the present confronts memories of the past in the form of collaged and veiled reproductions from the diaries he kept while living in China. At the time, the diaries were his attempt to construct meaning around his experience as a foreigner living in a wonderful and wonderfully confusing small industrial town in Hubei province. It was clear to him at the time, and has become even clear in the years since, that these attempts to make sense of my situation always missed their mark. By collaging his old diaries and drawings together in PhotoShop, and then drawing on top of them with a variety of mixed media, he searches for visual expressions of this repeated grasp at and loss of meaning. On another level, the drawings also address the distance he now has from the events themselves. As he reads through the old diaries, they help him remember his friends and his life in China, but they also remind him of how much he has forgotten.