Project statement:

Wanting to reconnect with family members I felt distanced from, I set out to explore complex family relationships and attempt to understand the point at which individuals who are related and connected in so many ways eventually separate. I am interested in the spaces in between; roads I travel connecting me to members of the family, but also the space and relation of family members to one another. These spaces are so intimate and so familiar, yet often so hard to fit into. Waiting for a Sign focuses on the division and closeness that exists simultaneously between family members.

Although one of my original goals was to understand the history of my family, the themes extend farther than the personal narrative. There is a greater narrative about the powerful nature of religious belief, and the rifts that can result, but also the strong pull to one another that can exist in families. There is a great expectation when a family is started, or expanded, and then eventually, there is a desire, even desperation, to hold onto what is being lost.

Bio and contact:

Jessica Ingram is an artist whose practice includes multi-media non-fiction narrative, public art commissions, and community-based programming. Jessica was a featured artist in the 2010 New York Photo Festival, the 2009 PhotoNola Prize winner, and nominee for the Santa Fe Prize for Photography and the Aperture Book Award. Along the Way, a video she completed with the Cause Collective was an Official Selection at the Sundance Film Festival. She contributed to What We Want Is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art (SUNY Press 2004) and was included in 25 Under 25, (PowerHouse Books 2003) and American Photography 20. She has received multiple public art commissions in the San Francisco Bay Area, and her work has been published and exhibited internationally. Jessica lives between Nashville, TN and Oakland, CA, where she is Assistant Professor in Undergraduate Photography and Graduate Fine Arts at California College of the Arts.

Jessica is a Nashville, TN, and Oakland, CA, based photographer.
To view more of her work, please visit her website: jessingram.com
You can also contact Jessica by e-mail: jess@jessingram.com