Jessica Buie

Jessica Buie was born in San Antonio, Texas in 1991. In May 2018, she received her MFA degree from the University of California San Diego and participated in a group show titled “Bodies in Trouble” at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. In June 2018, she presented a solo show of work at Public Pool Gallery in Los Angeles, CA before re-locating to Brooklyn, NY. In 2019, she showed work in group shows at the Houston Center for Photography, Bread & Salt in San Diego, and had her work used for the cover and feature of Press & Fold Magazine Issue #1. She is the co-founder of Private Practice, an artist-run gallery and studio space in Austin, Texas.

People Places Things

Jessica Buie’s conceptual photography practice is rooted in re-contextualizing the visual and textual languages that make up dominant narratives of desire, gender, and the body. She utilizes methods of collage, appropriation, and studio photography to scrutinize photography’s supposed objectivity. She considers public image-space, such as advertising, bookforms, and found material as places to experiment with established roles of subject and object and the mainstays of power that dictate these two roles. She views these acts of collecting, archiving, and re-structuring as parallel to the queer experience.

The work’s materiality is informed by commercial and advertising imagery, photography how-to manuals, pulp novels, and subjective material from the artist’s own camera and writings. In visualizing an alternative history of female subjectivity, Buie’s work questions the lines between objectification and representation.

Books are often used as objects of reference in Buie’s work, both in content and form. Her works often appear as deconstructed books and reflect the way in which books are used as identity totems and spaces where non-traditional desires or appearances can exist as something between public and private information. With a particular interest in dyke culture, Buie’s recent lines of inquiry engage with the culture and production of lesbian pulp novels from the 1950’s. The resulting works are reassessments of these common, disposable objects and the most common themes found in them: bodies of women found in lakes, and the impending death, imprisonment, or return to heteronormativity of the queer-leaning women who populate these stories.

Through gestures such as re-imagining illustrated pulp novel covers with subjective material, Buie attempts to wrench control from the dominant visual narratives describing female masculinity and queer desire. The resulting images act as a meditation on her own relationships between herself, her camera, her subjects, and the public images and language of desire.

To view more of Jessica Buie’s work please visit their website.