Jess T. Dugan: I Want You to Know My Story

Jess T. Dugan: I want you to know my story is an exhibition of new work by artist Jess T. Dugan. Dugan’s work explores identity through photography, video, and writing. Drawing from their experience as a queer, nonbinary person, their work is motivated by an existential need to understand and express themself and to connect with others. This immersive exhibition includes new photographs from their ongoing series Look at me like you love me, an audio soundtrack of their voice reading personal, diaristic texts, and the debut of a new video, Letter to My Daughter. The installation at CONTAINER marks an important evolution in the artist’s work: engaging deeply with the power of storytelling through immersive, interdisciplinary installations.

Look at me like you love me is a series of photographs and texts reflecting on desire, intimacy, companionship, and the ways our identities are shaped by these experiences. In this highly personal collection of work, Dugan brings together self-portraits, portraits of individuals and couples, and still lifes, interwoven with diaristic writings reflecting on relationships, solitude, family, loss, healing, and the transformations that define a life. Dugan has long used photography to understand their own identity and to connect with others on a deeper level. Their process of working slowly and collaboratively discloses moments of heightened psychological intensity in images that transcend the specifics of a particular person or place, engaging with what it means to know oneself alongside and through others. Using medium-format cameras and natural lighting, Dugan employs traditional photographic practices to depict these contemporary subjects, resulting in images that both evoke and reimagine the conventional dynamics of art-historical portraiture. Brought together here, these photographs function as an extended, oblique self-portrait as much as a catalogue of friends and loved ones. Through a diffuse but studied sequence of image and text, Look at me like you love me brings our attention to one of the most powerful and complex forms of intimacy – that of seeing and being seen.

Letter to My Daughter is an autobiographical video directed to their five-year-old daughter, Elinor, that centers around their experience with parenthood throughout the first five years of her life. The audio soundtrack is their voice reading a letter to Elinor, and the images are from their personal archive and include snapshots, ultrasound images, and photographs from Family Pictures,a long-term series of photographs focusing on three generations of their family. The letter is highly personal and addresses a variety of topics, including their expectations around parenthood, the long and circuitous journey of trying to have a child with both known and anonymous sperm donors, the experiences of miscarriage and loss, and their adjustment to parenthood as a queer and nonbinary person. Perhaps most importantly, it tries to put into words the intensity of love between a parent and child as well as the significant personal growth parenthood both inspires and requires. 

Jess T. Dugan: I want you to know my story showcases a selection of recent photographs including portraits of individuals, couples, self-portraits, and still lifes. The project is both outward-looking and self-expressive, representing inclusive notions of gender and sexuality and examining intimate connection as a means of seeing oneself through the eyes of others.

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