Jesse

Ly

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Jesse Ly

Jesse Ly is an Asian-American artist working across photography, sculpture, and bookmaking, navigating identity through the transitional qualities of images. In our gardens, Ly affixes Instax photographs onto panels cut from a single marigold image, holding moments of care and community within layered, protective compositions.

In the Words of the Artist

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Collage and assemblage act as an approach that immediately allows for an intention of continuance. The medium corresponds to adaptation, re-purposing, and extension in a way that functions as a decisive tool for growth that I find incredibly compelling. To be able to combine, or keep components in sequence or in conversation within a composition opens an avenue of possibility to extend and expand what a composition can be or should be.

This dichotomy is the area of play that led my interest in constructing these compositions. The background layers of each work are cut-down tiles from one singular image of marigolds that I made for a previous work. Initially, that image existed wholly and was installed in large exterior windows of a gallery layered with framed images of foo lions – existing under the moniker guard our gardens. Marigolds have both utilitarian and spiritual symbolism with nods towards protection. After the run of that show, in a vein of continuity, I cut down the mounted imagery to these thirty-six 11”x14” panels. They now exist in this modular state where, if they are presented as a grid, the original image can be loosely parsed together, but when shown in a mid-line fashion, the legibility becomes disrupted. Notating this differentiation between a part of the whole, but also an individuation of each piece creates this readied adaptability that resonates in the assemblage process.

The instant imagery was a way of adapting my relationship to image-making through quickly documenting moments of tenderness, sweetness, and care – tethers to memories to hold close. By adhering these different moments, constructions, and observations to these panels, a contrast comes into play, of balancing this preparedness and openness. All of these works exist on handmade panels I built that each is mounted and framed within – another layer of being held together and protected. Having all of these elements tied together amplifies the complication of wavering and balancing within these ebbs and flows that the photographs in their different states interrelate.

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I primarily approach making with photographic approaches and then incorporate interdisciplinary processes of sculpture, bookmaking, assemblage, and writing to inform and expand imagery. I am interested in navigating identity structures through representation, observation, and comprehension by considering the transitional qualities of existence found within imagery and their possible adornments. This allows me to experiment and plumb further into how depictions incite differentiation in presence and portrayal through presented context and actuality.

These concerns surface typically via self-analysis, fixating on how my immediate discursive relationships, inhabited spaces, and objects of interaction exist through, with, and in photographic formats. I do this to further the dialogues and relationships of image-making, existence, and conceptual formulations, and then can emphasize and accentuate via the sequencing, intervening, and examination of their compositions. This allows for the inquiry of physical, ambiguous, and psychological spaces to become re-contextualized through the perceptions, futilities, liminal spaces, and notions imagery creates.

Utilizing my own images, archive, and source material has become a responsive focus towards the contemporary condition of photography as a whole. Being able to be decisive as to when photographs can and should exist individually, in a sequence, in pairs, or layered and held together acts as a catalyst for process and concern. To make a conscious decision that multiple images need to be married together is just another mode of process in the practice.

In the case of this work, it was a pretty serendipitous realization to bring these elements all together. To have this photographic panel that was hyper-specifically site-responsive to a space, and then beginning the practice of making with the instant images, I feel as if I stumbled into this final resolution of these works. There was a throughline I noticed just living with the work in their different states and capacities in my studio that made me begin to experiment with how these objects lived layered together. So in a way, it was an organically developed gesture, a slow realization of the tethers to their components that drew me into constructing and combining them.

Our is a function of language that is indicative of this work as a whole. Collectivism and collaboration are a definitive concern in both my practice and personal life. I am lucky to be a member of many communities, and having the privilege to document and distill care throughout these groups enriches both simultaneously. Each instant print holds a tether, an anecdote, and an indexical structure connecting to moments, items, places, and people who encircle elements of my identity. By affixing them in the foreground to the components of the marigolds, I am casting a desire to hold, preserve, and safekeep these moments and what they represent. A fragment of the larger whole collectively and simultaneously stands on its own independently.

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There is an array of contexts, content, subject matter, process, and decisions that correspond in each piece. All are both physically constructed and conceptually tethered to their own specific focus, concern, and relation on their own and to each other.

I enjoy the ambiguous space of how the process of looking and thinking can conjure tethers to identity. It may be one thing for me to speak to the work or its specifics, but I view that as only a facet of the work and how I am connected to it. When folks get to be with and spend time with the works, I hope they get to develop their own connection. Whether this is them bringing their own relational anecdotes, finding a larger resonance, or just through enjoying the visual components, composition, or craft, if the work can impart a tie to others to or beyond me, then it is enacting its own process and continuity that I quite enjoy.

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About the Artist

Jesse Ly is an Asian-American photographic and image-based artist. They hold a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts with a minor in Art History and a certificate in Critical Visions from the University of Cincinnati’s College of DAAP. They are currently the Graphic Design and Photography Media Facilities Coordinator at the University of Dayton.

They have exhibited work both nationally across the US and internationally. They have had solo exhibitions at spaces including Filter Space - Chicago, IL, RoyGBiv Gallery -  Columbus, OH, Foster Gallery - Dedham, MA, and Gallery Photoland - Olympia, WA. They have also had notable group exhibitions at spaces such as The Contemporary Arts Center - Cincinnati, OH, FotoFilmic - Vancouver, BC, and The PH Museum - Bologna, Italy, among others. They have been a recipient of an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, a Regional Artist Renewal Grant via the National Endowment for the Arts, and were named a finalist for the Aperture Portfolio Prize in 2023.

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