JAC JACONETTA
⚠ site under construction ⚠
In the form of videos, sculptural objects, and text Jac Jaconetta considers the intersections between embodiment, technology, and the production of gender.
Their work focuses on the array of interfaces and systems that are instrumental in our making. By staying close to how things are made, they hope to witness how technologies and subjects shape each other and form feedback loops.
Jaconetta received their BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2015. They have exhibited at Miranda Kuo Gallery, The NARS Foundation, and The RISD Museum, among others. Their writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail and in their self-published artist's book A Thousand Identical Dorothys. They are currently working on a video surveying significant queer waterfronts throughout history, combining live action and animation to write a queer mythology of water.
In recent years following a medical leave they began learning to tattoo, their experiences with chronic illness guiding this turn to the body. Approaching the body as something malleable - for the body itself to be media - is, for them, incredibly trans. They hope to offer the wearer of their tattoos a felt sense of transformation and a little magic in the making.
Jaconetta received their BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2015. They have exhibited at Miranda Kuo Gallery, The NARS Foundation, and The RISD Museum, among others. Their writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail and in their self-published artist's book A Thousand Identical Dorothys. They are currently working on a video surveying significant queer waterfronts throughout history, combining live action and animation to write a queer mythology of water.
In recent years following a medical leave they began learning to tattoo, their experiences with chronic illness guiding this turn to the body. Approaching the body as something malleable - for the body itself to be media - is, for them, incredibly trans. They hope to offer the wearer of their tattoos a felt sense of transformation and a little magic in the making.
From Alumninum to Space Gray is a three channel video that considers how aluminum aesthetics are used to signal futurity, mobility, and progress. The footage surveys the mid-20th century US aluminum industry, the advent of CGI in Terminator II and ‘90s media, and the contemporary use of aluminum in Apple products. These scenes that blur agile, able, white bodies with pliable aluminum matter are haunted by the legacy of aluminum production that uses land and laborers alike as resources to maintain the social mobility of some over others.
3 Channel Video
Total Runtime 2:58
A Thousand Identical Dorothys is a digital filing system of indexed text and image files. Comprised largely of screenshots and original text, the files trace how bodies, user-interfaces, and commodities are haunted by the labor that shapes them. The project is interested in the ways constructed identities such as "girl" become legible, approximated, and proliferated. The folder is available for download below as a ZIP. Alternatively, the content has been reformatted and handbound into a self-published book.
A Thousand Identical Dorothys dot Zip
“In Search of A Clear Reflecting Pool or Mirror” (2019) is loosely based on a quest, reminiscent of those from low-tech video games. The video progresses from bird’s eye perspective to first person point-of-view, as a subject searches for their reflection. Animations of an avatar moving through maze-like circuitry are paired with records of being read, misread, and reflected back to oneself. This includes screen recordings of the artist reverse image searching their own selfies, to find that google variously identifies them as boy, girl, and domestic long-haired cat. Moments of distortion such as this are offered in tandem with expressions of longing and instances of being seen that are so often sought after in digital spaces.