Digital Media Art Collection.

About Opaque Bodies

Opaque Bodies is part of a body of work titled, “Marked". The work combines traditional photographic techniques with contemporary digital processes, performance, and sculpture. The title “Marked” immediately refers to a prominent birthmark on my neck that has continually prompted verbal and physical abuse by strangers and appears in the work through the reproduction of its shape and color. Further, I am considering other “birthmarks” one could attribute to a body, specifically gender and race. I’m interested in how the “birthmarks” of gender and race have affected women through history and in confronting the ways in which this has undermined intersectionality in the history of feminism. I am visualizing these ideas in the production of the work through the masking of film with laser cut dark slides, the masking of my body with handmade skin-suits, and the marking of photographic prints as a means to represent the nuances of identity. The work oscillates between depicting vulnerability and privilege, employing various ways of representing the body as the primary subject to address the history and future of feminism. 

Artist: Jaclyn Wright
Title: Opaque Bodies
Date: 2019
Medium: Video, color, sound, 3 min 38 sec.
Credit: Gift of the artist
Accession Number: 003.2019
Copyright: © Jaclyn Wright

Jaclyn Wright is an interdisciplinary artist and educator originally from the Great Lakes region. She has previously served as the visiting artist at the University of Cincinnati, the artist in residence at Latitude Chicago, and guest co-editor of Papersafe Magazine, “Turbulent Bodies / A Cross, A Wild Sea”. Wright has also exhibited work at David Weinberg Gallery, Chicago; SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia; Perspective Gallery, Chicago; Sala Muncunill, Barcelona, Spain; Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Chicago; and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, Utah to name a few. Following her 2016 monograph, “Afterglow: Compact, Orientable, Spacelike” which was included in the top ten artist books at LA Art Book Fair, write published an essay and contributed images for the publication Too Good to be Photographed, which explores the various sides of photographic failure. She received her BA from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois and her MFA from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. In 2018 she accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Photography & Digital Imaging at the University of Utah, College of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City.