Jemima Wyman: A Haze Descends

About

Its name refers to ‘en masse’ (in a group all together) or exceptionally large, vis-a-vis the quantity of matter in a physical body. Wyman zeroes-in on the functional and symbolic attire worn by protestors and activists for protective cover, demonstration, or both. A Haze Descends finds Wyman scouring her catalog for emergent commonalities and serendipities in motifs and their means of deployment, particularly the use of smoke and skulls—cutting down images, isolating similar fragments, and reassembling them in new collective-shapes through her photo collage practice.

Wyman treats image as metonym, vehicle and symbol. In the precarious, constantly shifting environment of a public protest, where verbal communication often disappears into noise, the urgency of materials and visual shorthand becomes apparent. Protest wear—masks, costumes, flags—becomes both signal and camouflage, as if to scream more loudly in anonymity, while transforming the protesting body into a metonym for the cause. A skull plays at multiple registers of death: harbinger of doom, witness for the fallen, the pirate’s Jolly Roger, or simply “poison.” Similarly, a plume of smoke seen rising above a protest site, whether the result of fireworks, flares, tear gas, or burning property, prompts connotations of warning, distress, and alarm. It's diaphanous pall wafts across territorial and ideological bounds, pulling everything into a haze that both obscures and amplifies.

The growing MAS-archive provides Wyman with a lexicon from which to build her own syntaxes, which in turn mirror their component parts. A mass of skulls coalesces into an ossuary in one work Undead Aggregate Icon (1)... while in another, a voluptuous bloom bursts into multicolored splinters of cloud. The title of each work is a sprawling, multi-page record detailing each constituent image and the associated protest, location, and date, gathering disparate historical moments into a partial yet sweeping account of global unrest.