Testament

What on earth is going on in Jennifer Thoreson’s ​“Testament?” I’ve spent a good deal of time with her pictures this week, and I still don’t entirely know. Oddly, this keeps me coming back to them. They are just so strange. Thoreson’s visual language is spoken among sculptors, but it’s a bit foreign over here in photography, and it stood out at this year’s Fotofest.

Fortunately, she offers us a guide in her writing. She’s pretty open about the emotional content of the work, and it’s ambitious. She’s tapped in to the dynamics of suffering, its weight and its eventual relief. The characters in her constructed scenes endure wooly, fleshy, cumbersome weights. With titles like ​“Cancer” ​“White Mass” and ​“Cocoon” her pictures push forward the frustratingly animal side of the human experience, our wrangling within our own imperfect and temporal bodies.

But in the same imagery, we also see the complete emotional support of a friend, a co-sufferer, the communion wafer, and a family embracing through pain. These gifts of the soul are present with the burdened ones, in the same room and the same mess. She is imaging the work of pain and healing in both body and soul at once. That’s not an easy feat; it’s no wonder they are so memorably strange.

- Lisa W.


You can see the full project and read Jennifer’s thoughts here: https://​www​.jenniferthoreson​.com/​w​o​r​k​s​/​t​e​s​t​ament