Jesse Draxler | The World is Mine & I'm Thinking about You
Lovers
© Jesse Draxler
Text by Luxi H.
The second major publication of Jesse Draxler The World is Mine & I’m Thinking about You is coming out this month from Sacred Bones, accompanying the artist’s so far most comprehensive and important exhibition at Naked Eye Studio, Los Angeles. The new publication encompasses the artist’s multidisciplinary works including photography, painting, collage and fragmentary social media posts that emphasize the dark, absurd undertone of Draxler’s oeuvre. Having worked with Alexander McQueen, Prince, Ferrari, and many more, in his new monograph Jesse Draxler places his signature violent, visceral and brutal aesthetics side by side with a comprehensive presentation of his studio practice, delivering an enduring exhibition with flesh and bones, with a fuller context.
Jesse Draxler in studio
© Jesse Draxler
Draxler’s monograph starts with a boomerang title The World is Mine & I’m Thinking about You, and tacitly, the intertextuality between U&I has heralded the blurring, mingling and interweaving of an aesthetic black and white which sits at the center of the artist’s strategy. To tear down the duality of black and white, human faces have been Draxler’s favorite battleground and most fertile icons. Manipulating images of skeleton, headshots, thermal images, x-ray images, sketches of human face, and photographic and oil-painted portraits, Draxler experiments with different ways of distorting a face, of unleashing the terrifying, uncanny potential of an anthropomorphic iconology. Throughout the photobook, there isn’t a single pair of undistorted human eyes. The completely blackened, whitewashed, or deformed eye sockets become the central well to brood the dark soup of terror. But to take a step back, the intense expression of angst, of anger, of bitter curse, of fragility, all comes to a simple manipulation of black and white – probably the fulcrum of Achimedes expressed on a monotone palette.
Tar Ghost
© Jesse Draxler
Three Moments of an Explosion
© Jesse Draxler
To consider Draxler’s works in the closely anthropomorphic deformation, it comes as no surprise to see their visceral potency. In The World is Mine & I’m Thinking about You, pain is translated into visual details and photographic design that evokes an almost impeccable response and remembrance of physical pain on the side of the viewers. Piercing and stitching are two themes that Draxler constantly engages with. In one of the rare close-ups in the book, his camera focuses on a bare scalp. On the undecorated scalp, a slightly indent scar shows the trace of skin stitches, an indirect variation of the earliest memory of pain that a human being might have – provided you haven’t escaped the scalp venoclysis injection as a toddler.
Liquid Swords
© Jesse Draxler
What might be familiar to scholars in media studies but fairly unheard of to the very new generation of social media users is the fact that Jesse Draxler is one of the earliest artists who made a name through the online platform Tumbler. Probably to give a nod and self-mockery to the early history, Draxler has also placed in the book fragmentary quotations from social media that cancel, erase, and wipe out what the images intend to express. At the center of the circular-structured monograph, there stands a void, an intense nihilism, but specifically it is also a nihilism that has found beautiful expression on the grey scale.
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© Jesse Draxler
