Jordan Wilson
My thesis is a collection of portraits drawn from pictures on my phone’s camera roll. They’re casual pictures that are not meant to be metaphorical, symbolic, or allegorical. My work represents moments that came and went in passing, described by the impermanent details that made them.
The physicality of re-describing these pictures with my hand allows me to spend time with details that I wouldn’t necessarily get to process in real time. I get to study how the corner of a mouth or the droop of an eyebrow make an expression, recreate the range of colors on an earlobe as it absorbs the light that passes through it, or retrace the chains that weave in and out of a fur coat. Those sorts of details characterize a moment’s impermanence in that regardless of any seeming familiarity, regularity, or ritualistic occurrence, the specific slice of time and space a picture describes will always be unique.
On the one hand I find a certain comfort in the images’ stillness. The subjects can’t move or react to my presence while I copy down the flare of a nostril or fold of a sleeve. They can’t judge me or demand that I speak. None of their contents are aging or growing or decaying. I can pick them apart and piece them back together again. But despite their dizzying clarity, I’ll never be able to re-enter them. The moment doesn’t exist anymore and it never will again, and to me that’s unsettling.
I’ve watched my friend Frieda hold that college dining hall bowl hundreds of times, make that passing expression as she scoops out a bite. It seems dumb to write that soon she’ll eat out of a different bowl and use different utensils. One day she won’t wear that sweater or the beaded necklaces we make out of elastic string, just like my brother Noah no longer carries around a plastic sword just to snuggle with the dog.
These changes are unpreventable and far from tragic. I know that without impermanence, time and space and life wouldn’t exist in the first place. I like how pens and pencils feel as they glide across paper and how thick oil paint coats my metal knife when I drag it across glass to mix pigments until they’re just right. I like returning to the same image over and over again. In this way, my thesis is also the material byproduct of my time spent looking and thinking about these passing moments and what made them what they were.