About A Girl

Jessica Westhafer

Degree: MFA

Area: Painting

Thesis Statement

I often reflect on these personal stories, my childhood experiences, and my life now. How my unruly adolescence helped me escape the troubling expectations of a religion that had been imposed upon me and how those childhood experiences left me with a dark sense of humor, confidence, and the strength to endure the painful aftermath of losing my family to religious excommunication at eighteen. These events fuel the narratives within my work, allowing me through paint to take charge of my life story and reinvent history. By recreating childhood events and memories, I am inserting my current position of independence and maturity into moments of extreme instability. Tragic comedy becomes a way for me to gain perspective, demystify the rules, strictures, and expectations of my world.

The subjects in my paintings function as avatars; they personify feelings of apprehension, nostalgia, and sadness. Simultaneously, these avatars are heroic and demonstrate their strength and bravery through moments of vulnerability. I borrow color palettes and exaggerated forms from the 90’s cartoons I grew up watching, utilizing playful imagery to mask painful and darker narratives. Artificial color and atmospheric light hint at an otherworldly space, a place that is imagined. Figures are rendered comically noodle-like and stretchable, they are not tethered to any real-world limitations. Dark humor enables the subject to take control over feelings of insecurity by their own acceptance of them. Thus, they regain mastery over their fate and circumstances, becoming powerful in seemingly powerless situations.