there

From March 25th, 2026 to April 22nd, 2026

artist statement:

Though film has always been the first love, I’ve had a long relationship with digital photography and video, in-step with its flexibility (perhaps its ability to absorb an attempt, and make another attempt right after, alongside the first or the second, or in relationship to them both). Overwhelmed with the infinity of this practice—the illusion of immortality that working with digital images can illicit, I came to a point when I inadvertently sought a medium that felt closer to the way my body works: slow, finite, and vulnerable to almost everything.

there, among other recent work, didn’t know if it wanted to be seen. I am unsure, still. About images. About language. About how to exist in a world that chooses to murder life. It has felt obscene to practice art, and “live” during ongoing genocides. But, there’s a version of that feeling that is misguided (by design). Our responsibility is to do what we can. To ask what that is. In looking at the four rolls of film I’ve gathered over the last two years, I felt that something was moving beneath and throughout, despite being horrified of what this could mean. At the moment, I’m feeling that personhood is complex and asymmetrical and it fails (in its relationship to itself and the world), but it also has the ability to touch the membrane of another possibility, another person, and transform. In a way, it is only from an “I” that I can see, only from this body—and these hands—that I can move, play, and anchor around a responsibility to life; moving towards the sacred—without always knowing exactly what or how that is.

there is a selection of film photography from the last two years. The collection is both a central viewing point, and a scattered arc; blurring the self/gaze with place, perhaps allowing them to be so. Though each photo is its own world, and belongs to geographies that are physically distant from one another, the photography also belongs to a larger, ambient whole, that is not violently separate. Behind the photo, or beyond the photo, there is a larger context that we don’t see within the frame, but feel. Similarly, a whole can appear partial, incomplete, moving, and changed, perhaps because we (and our perceptions) can appear partial, incomplete, moving, and changed. Unlike the photograph, we are never stationary. Here, there is a gap, or, an incongruence. One we must remain with.

To see is to interact (with the world and yourself). To exist is to interact (with the world and yourself). If the camera is a kind of eye, an apparatus separate from the self, an extension (and odd substitute) of our own gazes, I want to believe that, maybe, there can be an honor in “seeing.” Reproduction of “reality” not as a reduction of the “real” made thin or glossed over by a machine, or a system of power, but rather a kind of potential miracle that has collapsed the distance between the self and the other, and invites us there—between; inside this relationship (when repeatedly and consciously tended to) that has the shared power to dissolve the curtain often hung before the inside and the outside of ourselves; placing us with something liminal and contextual and idiosyncratic and personal and so close that we may already intuit it to be true, inherent, untouchable, yet ever present—there.

For almost two years, I’ve been recovering the sight in my left eye, after losing much of my vision there in the summer of 2024. I couldn’t see the Big E reflected in the mirror, though I knew it was there, large and bold. “Seeing” feels especially fragile, fleeting, and dear. Like something I’m responsible for. Like something I’ve always been responsible for. I’ve learned more about the eye, itself, and its layered mysteries; the cornea—the eye’s own kind of curtain that hovers, protective and oscillating, between our souls and the air; how a scar on the cornea can blur vision, refract light, birth color; a scar that, beneath a microscope, looks like a cluster of stars; a scar that, absent a microscope, becomes a half-moon. With images all around us, telling us, forbidding us, tearing at us, removing us, numbing us, inspiring and moving us, boring us, astonishing and catching us, deluding us, and perhaps conveying nothing, or, very little, it’s our responsibility to try to understand where we are in our relationship with ourselves and others and images; to, at the very least, question what it means to “look” upon atrocities, atrocities alongside impunity, incomplete joys, and our living, so we may attempt to mind our positions so as to be accountable to life—and with an openness that may break and reorient our eyes and how they see. Without knowing it, we are continuously relocating where we begin and end; wondering and opening towards what we may never understand, perhaps turning away, and into illusion.

For now, I’m moving with this flawed orientation of critical but tender (wrecked) observation and interaction; subject to change, quivering, false starts, and painful ends; attempting to soften the curiosity that hasn’t been broken of its desire to learn, its ache to see, exist, despite the fluctuations and material realities present in fear, suspended in the unknown. there attempts to honor subjectivity, its potential to alter when in relation to, and what may be, love, through photography as a fluid, sensitive, useful, temporal, and sacred friend. We don’t know what it is, but we continue pointing to it, so that understanding, and room for compassionate, accountable thought may remain not only possible—but entirely tangible, perhaps already present—here. Just there. And waiting for you to see it. To change your relationship to it.

All film photography is sized at 33.13 x 21.96 cm. (13 x 8 in.) Printed on fine art archival paper, (giclée). Each piece is priced respectively.

To purchase a piece from there

For purchases, inquires, and requests, please contact me at jeskalled@gmail.com. This is a limited edition exhibition, so there is only one of each artwork. Purchasing originals is on a first come first serve basis, but I am open to special requests and circumstances, especially for mutual aid purposes. Don’t hesitate to contact me. Every order is a pre-order, and shipping prices will depend on your location. I will likely be collaborating with two fine art printers, one in Tokyo (see art from: A year of forgetting the pines), and one in “the u.s.” This will lower shipping costs significantly for those purchasing from those geographies. Know that purchasing my art supports my life directly, and makes it possible to live and create. Thank you for being here.

— jes

This is \ from where, we loved (2018)

25.4 x. 33.83 cm 10 x 13 in.

150.00

This piece exists on its own: pulled from a different frame of mind in 2018, having gradually come into this shape. Its final form is a mixed mediums fine art print on archival paper. The original components are made of oil paint and pen on paper, which were then scanned together and played with digitally; texture arrived, and has been left as is. This is \ from where, we loved (2018) was featured in my recent Swallow entry, Beneath the table. It was painted in 2018 around the time when N told me that “A window is an opening, and also a frame.”