JESS LEVEY

Bio

Jess Levey was born and raised in Park Slope Brooklyn. She received her BA from Barnard College where she studied photography under the mentorship of Thomas Roma at Columbia University.  

Jess is currently an MFA candidate at Hunter College.

To support her artistic endeavors, Jess has worked as a Photo editor for leading Magazines for the past 9 years and she has also worked as a freelance photographer for the past 5 years shooting anything from Parties to White Castle store fronts.

Statement:

Since the mid 1990s, Jess’s work has involved the creation of conceptually based photographs with the body as the main point of entry.  What began as narrative based work, however, quickly took a socio-political turn, and by adding text to her body via projection for her “New Intimacy project”, she began to incorporate a process that she continues to develop.    

Currently, rather than projecting text, Jess projects imagery onto the human figure and onto objects. In her most recent projects In Defense Of Food, and Omnivore’s Dilemma, (Titles of which has been appropriated from Michael’s Pollen’s brilliant books of the same name) the images of food projected are essential in the “reading” of the photographs. 

In Omnivore’s Dilemma, Jess has visually translated Pollan’s brilliant explanation of our changing food landscape. In this book, he explains how the overuse and over growth of corn in this country has led to a seriously altered and detrimental diet and landscape. However, corn is not the only source of cheap energy in the supermarket – much of the fat added to processed foods also derives from soybeans.

For the In Defense of Food project, Jess was more interested in a primal exploration of food and with the tension that exists between arousal and repulsion, between the grotesque and the erotic. Food, a universal need and an indulgence, represents impermanence and transformation while projected imagery of mass produced foods further exemplifies the role of artificiality within our culture and also within the photographic medium.

Our current agricultural landscape has been directly affected by the Food industry’s reliance on cheap crops, and by our diet and vice versa. This Symbiotic relationship between humans and the earth is one that should be extremely beneficial, but instead we have dangerously altered not only our bodies but also the earth that we so desperately rely on.