Jessica Hosman

About me:

I believe in chaos. Time will continue moving, events will happen. And whatever does happen, was the only thing that could have happened. That’s not to say that I had no choice in it, or that it was fated to happen no matter what I chose. Just that whatever I do causes chain reactions that, in turn, create the events around me. And luck is really just the way we interpret chaos into terms we can understand and deal with, or feel we have some control over.

When I began this project, I had no idea that it would make all this clear to me. It started out as a game—a symbolic method to remove myself from a country I didn't want to be in. Recently returned from almost a year living in Spain, I was disenchanted with the U.S., to say the least. To me, my long-lost American friends seemed painfully unchanged and unaware of everything I had been through. My old life sagged on me, ten sizes too big for my new frame. I was completely disconnected from everything.

At the start, the project was a way for me to visually disconnect myself from my surroundings. The process is simple: shoot an entire roll of film of a specific subject, then rewind it back into the canister and begin shooting the roll again, this time with a different subject matter. So, for example, I might go outside and shoot a roll of nature shots, then rewind the canister, put it back in the camera, and shoot a roll of studio self-portraits on top of it. This creates multiple-exposure images inside the camera, which may or may not line up with each other, depending on how the film loads the second time around. Sometimes days, weeks, or months go by between shooting each layer of images. All of these factors create images that may seem completely random, but in fact, have a lot to do with process, organization, and the choices made after the film is developed.

Through chaos, chance, accident, luck, or whatever you believe in, the images have been recorded and are part of my reality, and now part of yours. When you look at them, remember that, as Jean Baudrillard says, "seen as a whole, in terms of meaning, the world is disappointing. Seen in detail and by surprise, it is always perfectly obvious."

www.jessicahosman.com