Jessica Teckemeyer

I create mixed-media animal sculptures to explore the multiplicity of human behavior. Media stories and observing social interactions fuel my creative impulses. The highly finished artworks feature dramatic, glossy human eyes to clue viewers into the introspective nature of my ideation. My research explores aspects of psychology, literature, film, media, and contemporary monster theory, which reveals how we develop socially. From these resources, I extract iconography to inform contemporary issues. Narratives composed in literature, films, and the media influence our contact with the physical environment, how we conceive it, how we shape it, how we construct it, and how we experience it. In my work, the unreal becomes tangible.

I am interested in the complexity of human behavior driven by primal, instinctual reactions (unconscious), and culturally learned responses (conscious). Prominent cultural influences include history, religion, science, media, and literature. As social creatures, we combat reason versus instinct. Through translating human experience into the form of an animal, we look at ourselves from another viewpoint — focused on our untamed, dangerous selves. Animals are devoid of race, gender, and body politics. The natural behavior of the animal depicted holds a direct relationship to the conceptual framework. The resulting artworks reveal archetypes encapsulating impulses and desires through unexpected juxtapositions.

In recent years, mass shootings and violence have dominated media stories. In response, I began to express two distinct archetypes: victim and attacker. “Human Shadow” represents the attacker through pairing predator and prey relating to the complexity of the attacker’s character and motivations. “Human Shadow” is a newborn deer with the shadow of a wolf; the head is visually distorted as if a slow-motion blur has permanently morphed the physicality. Ernest Hemingway stated, “All things truly wicked start from innocence.” The statement implicates the murky depths of our unconscious. Each person naturally develops a “shadow” beginning in childhood composed of repressed personality traits as culture teaches to split and polarize dark and light. By focusing on allusions to fierceness, monstrosity, and mutation, the physicality alludes to a fascinating paradox of attraction and repulsion.