Jacqueline Freedman was born in Washington, D.C. and has lived in New York City and Boston. Currently living in Los Angeles, she works with collage, drawing and painting. She exhibits in Los Angeles and has also exhibited in Boston and Ireland. As an Adjunct Professor of Visual Culture, Art History, Art Appreciation and Film Appreciation she has taught at the University of Redlands, El Camino College and Los Angeles Harbor College. (See Resume)
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
For much of my career as an artist, I have made abstractions. Directing my gaze inward, I primarily relied on my imagination. Fragile insect skeletons, diatoms in the deepest darkest sea, the warped space of the cosmos, architectural CAD drawings were all important jumping off points. Using the repetition of a tiny modular form, usually a circle or line, my drawings mimicked the way I imagined nature, at the cellular level, would grow and change. I was fascinated by the way a tiny modular unit could become a larger abstract structure. I thought of my work in terms of both microcosmic and macrocosmic figuration; proportion, space, movement and time, growth and change the paramount considerations.
During 2020, my work went through a major shift.
The Covid pandemic caused a forced retreat into the physical interior space of home/studio keeping safe until a vaccine was developed. Inside most of the time, I found myself wanting and needing to look outward to the world. Threats from disease, climate change and a democracy in crisis fostered voracious reading and viewing of images keeping me connected geopolitically as I sheltered from an infected outside world.
Hourly activities included looking through windows of phone, computer, TV and home, maintaining an alertness and awareness of a capsizing world both frightening and solacing. Through all this, though, I could always rely on nature to be the most comforting. Weekly walks in nature, Kenneth Hahn Park, the Los Angeles Arboretum, the wetlands of Playa del Rey, and the beaches, helped restore calm. During these walks, I photographed the natural world’s beauty creating an archive to remind myself of ‘abundance’ in a world full of loss. In the studio, I mined the images from my own photographic archive, as well as from the internet, social and print media. I used my home printer to make color xeroxes of these digital images and began a different way of making art.
The series “Collage Stories” is the ongoing result of this outward looking. I think of this series as a weaving together of natural world photographic images and real world events, political and ecological, giving the viewer an abundant field from which to create their own story.
*All photos of my work on this site taken by Gene Ogami.