Curatorial text of the exhibition “Sense of Self“ by Jessica Trosman, Tomas Redrado Art, Miami, December 2023.
In the discursive stance of approaching an artist's work, origin stories are used to explain and justify their career and place their obsessions in context. This array of stories presents an enormous diversity, and in all cases, a prominence of extraordinary elements. Some artists refer to traumatic experiences in their lives as the epiphanic moment in which the destiny of a lifetime in art is revealed. Others claim to bear, ever since the naivety of their childhood, a stubbornness that propels them towards art. These are the artists that suggest having been "born" as such. Nowadays, in a more contemporary refinement of discourses, the sociologically defined identities of individuals are the source from which the legitimacy of their practice exudes. Belonging to a minoritarian community whose vital praxis diverges from the customs and concepts of the hegemonic culture is the hyperlink that connects with legitimated discourses and gives the work a political and aesthetical discursivity.
Sense of Self is the title of the second solo exhibition by Jessica Trosman, an insatiable creator with the experience of an enormous career in the industry of design and production of clothing who now chooses sculpting as the vehicle to explore her way of doing. It is impossible to separate Jessica the artist from the designer, an identity that persists in the memory of her audience and in the language of her sculptural work. In the context of the emergence of Artificial Intelligence tools that are capable of generating content through a complex system that averages and reinterprets the entire history of human creativity, the intentions and the subjectivity of a sentient being, incarnated in the real world, become -more than ever- a necessary condition for an artistic object to produce sense.
Jessica Trosman describes her life as an exploration on how to exist in the world as a doer. Urged by the immediate need to approach actual practice in the working field, she dropped her fashion design studies and without expecting any external approval, she dug her hands into the machines and the whirlwinds of the market and industry. This vital impulse served as the channel that the elementary intuitions in the heart of art found in her: mistake is the midwife of discovery, matter thinks when it's animated by the hands of who manipulates it; the artwork is not only seen by the eye, but also by the presence of the body of the spectator that is facing it, as if there was a magical mirror capable of reflecting the internal state of the person who is standing in front of it.
The origin story of Jessica Trosman the artist would be that of an internationally renowned designer whose curiosity made her transcend the limits imposed by society. The stratification of her sensitivity, a result of her experience in this field, defines her relationship with this new praxis: a different appreciation, consumption and circulation system. Throughout her career as a fashion designer, her pieces were recognized for the exploration they proposed, seeking an abstraction from the lexicon of constructive systems (classical and original) and the supremacy of the user’s experience of awe and discovery. Defined by its semi-hidden details, her work is a sort of riddle warped in textiles and thread.
The sculptures created by Jessica remove the human body from its role as a medium and support for formal explorations. In this shift, the body encounters its external limit, a sort of rigid and structured garment in which we tuck ourselves: architecture, the city. Jessica Trosman’s new pieces, hybrids of garments, furniture and 3D catastrophe snapshots, are located high and wide along the physical space in order to explore the formal and expressive limits of the materials with which she has historically worked: textiles, colors, and prints. The structures Jessica experiments with in this new phase involve a new lexicon that is starting to inhabit her: metal plates, woodworks, wire cables, and synthetic cords that tense and suspend her creations on the stage of art, like dancers that were frozen at the peak of a leap, whose elegance is emphasized by the uncertainty of their final form.