This post was originally published on artnews.com
Growing up in Los Angeles without a car, Jessica Magallanes Martinez spent a lot of time on the bus, especially on her four-hour commute from her home in South Central to Notre Dame Academy, an all-girls Catholic high school in Culver City. “That was the beginning of shaping all the observing,” she said. “The bus becomes this intimate, temporary space where you see the same people over and over. You build almost parasocial relationships. It presents the world in a different way.”
Another formative experience was an art history class in which she first saw photography presented as “art” in the form of images by Nan Goldin and Larry Clark. “It blew my mind,” she said. “I realized that there was a word for what I had always been doing, that there was a way to physically lock in the way I was framing and noticing moments.”
Pictures she took on bus travels between home and school got her into Syracuse University, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in photography before moving on to an MFA at Columbia University. While photography remains the core of her practice, Magallanes Martinez has also ventured into performance, video, and, more recently, installation.
Her observational roots and the repetition of photographing familiar places continue to inform Magallanes Martinez’s image-making today. “A big part of my work is time as a character,” she said, noting that she prefers shooting with a medium-format camera, in harsh afternoon light. “I’m interested in the sun as a character, the way it erodes and erases layers of history. The sun is something that illuminates but is also destructive.”
Another point of interest is the Virgen de Guadalupe, which—with its loaded histories across Catholicism, the Chicano civil rights movement, and feminist critique—has long been a subject of Magallanes Martinez’s pictures. She ascribes her relationship with that imagery to a personal connection with the death of a young man who was shot in a gang initiation as he was leaving her neighbor’s house next door. The bullet that hit him was only feet from Magallanes Martinez’s bed.
She began photographing his death shrine with her own form of photographic religiosity, and then turned to shooting other death shrines nearby; she continues this zealous recording whenever she returns to LA. “It opened my eyes to things that I had always grown up with,” she said, adding that it made her think about “what had happened to my neighborhood to create an environment like that.”
Last year, Magallanes Martinez began a new series in which she and others step into the roles of the Virgen de Guadalupe and San Juan Diego, to whom the Virgen appeared. Blurring the line between representation and abstraction, the new pictures—which she produces as cyanotypes on large swaths of fabric—are what she calls “sacred honorific images of my body” that aim to show that “my body should be valued.”
She added, in relationship to her teaching at her alma mater, Syracuse, “I think about what I ask my students to do: imagine the worlds that they want to exist and try rendering that. I am trying to do that myself too.”