Artist Statement
Each series is distinct, in subject matter, content and treatment. The common conceptual thread throughout the various portfolios is a reflection on the interface between nature and urban technological culture. With an ironic and quirky point of view, I juxtapose organic and manmade elements to reflect the tensions inherent in this interface. I delight in using art historical references as a connection to the past, while pondering the various fictions of our future. The photographic studio is the theater in which the production of the narrative occurs.
Process Statement
Natura Morta Portfolio:
4x5 Arca Swiss, color negative film.
No digital alteration.
Chromogenic photographs or archival pigment prints from the scanned negative.
The sizes range from 20x24 and 30x40 inches. There are a total of 25 prints per image.
Dates:1991-1996
The Theater of Insects Portfolio:
4x5 Arca Swiss and Mamiya 6x7 RB camera,color negative film;Canon 5-D digital camera.
The photographs are chromogenic photographs and archival digital prints
Sizes range from 8x10 to 20x24 to 30x24 inches. Total prints per image: 25
Dates: 2001-10
Global Folly Portfolio:
Unique Polaroid 20x24 prints as well as chromogenic prints from 4x5 color negative film.
The Polaroid prints were produced in New York and Los Angeles under several Artist Grants awarded from the Polaroid Corporation. Dates 1989-1991
Jo Whaley has lifelong roots in the San Francisco Bay Area, having earned advanced degrees in Art and Photography from the University of California, Berkeley by 1980. Whaley originally studied to become a painter and later took a day job as a scenic artist for the San Francisco Opera and other Bay Area theatrical companies. Her theater experience openly informs her photography, in which she creates stage sets and employs numerous props, painted backdrops and dramatic lighting. All of her photographic series fuse the language of photography with the language of painting and rely on an expressive use of color.
Widely exhibited, her work is held in the permanent collections of many museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Art. Her touring exhibit “The Theater of Insects” opened at the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC in the Fall of 2008 and has continually toured to museums throughout the United States. Currently the exhibit is at The Henry Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock Abbey, UK. A monograph, “The Theater of Insects” was published by Chronicle Books.
Jo Whaley received one of the last National Endowment Visual Artists Fellowships in 1994
for her “Natura Morta” series. She received numerous grants to work with the Polaroid 20x24 camera in New York between 1989 and 1993 for her series of nudes, entitled “Global Folly”. She keeps studios in Santa Fe, NM and Berkeley, CA and shares her life with the photographer Greg Mac Gregor.
