Jessica Harvey (Cranbrook)

From “Grandmother’s House” series – Front Wall/Faded Kitchen
Film negative, archival digital print

My name is Jessica Harvey. I’m from a rural town in Illinois, called Minooka. I moved to Chicago to go to undergraduate school at Columbia College. Now I’m at Cranbrook Academy of Art studying photography. The things that I’m mostly interested in photo are time, and the effects of time on objects, the effects of time on relationships, on people, and places.

I’ve been doing art since I was little, my parents would take me to art camp, or plays and things, and I would always be interested in drawing or making dioramas of anything that I could. In my undergraduate, I was mostly formally trained in photo. So making the image was the most important thing. Even though I would like to mix media, it wasn’t really encouraged in my undergraduate studies. Here at Cranbrook what I’ve started to do is mix medias such as fibers and other materials into my artwork. When I was back at home, I photographed mostly abandoned spaces, rural farmhouses that had been abandoned and were left to the elements.

So now I’m working on a more personal relationship about how time affects things. And my work has turned more into family relationships, how you relate to someone who has passed on. How you can bridge the gap between life and death, and still create a relationship between the two even after somebody’s gone. Right now, the things I’m most interested in, are exploring a lot of different media within photography, such as projections, installation, and seeing how that will make my art come together, instead of thinking of fine art separate from photo. So here I want to explore that, and hopefully it will work while I’m at Cranbrook.