Texas Photographic Society Presents: "Marked" by Jaclyn Wright

• Sat, Mar 7, 2020 - Sat, Apr 18, 2020  

Texas Photographic Society Presents: NATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY AWARD 

Winner: Jaclyn Wright
Juried by Natasha Egan

Marked

On view: March 7 - April 18, 2020

Marked combines traditional photographic techniques with contemporary digital processes, performance, and sculpture. The title refers to a prominent birthmark on my neck, which has drawn verbal and physical abuse from strangers. Reproductions of the birthmark’s shape and color appear throughout the work. In Marked, I consider ways we are marked from birth, specifically through gender. Birthmarks are like political boundaries on a map, expressing the concomitant desire to include and exclude, to mark belonging through exclusion and differentiation. The work explores the parallels between human attempts to control, shape, and extract from the land and the body. This is visualized through the demarcation of the birthmark as a means to represent what is through what isn’t. 

Both the landscape and the body are tropes represented through photographic surveys, and both raise questions of power, representation and ideology. Photographic surveys of the American West sought to document, aestheticize, and colonize the lands and the bodies viewed through the camera’s lens.  These surveys facilitated the movement of white bodies onto the land and native bodies off of it. Photographs of the landscape and the body still carry this trace of privilege and propaganda. Marked responds critically to this history by examining the fraught relationship between the land and the body and its colonization by both patriarchy and photography.

For more information, please visit: https://texasphoto.org/photography-award
Exhibition photos available at:  https://www.sawyeryards.com/art/exhibition-archive/jaclyn-wright

Sabine Street Studios 
1907 Sabine St. 
Houston, TX 77007