Jaymee Harvey Willms Artist

Fairy tales, biblical stories, and folk narratives inform both my female identity and the conceptual underpinning of my sculpture. I insert personal biases, memories, hopes, and fears into my work in order to satirize and expose cultural assumptions about gender, sexuality, and power. To this end, I make my sculptural work from quotidian objects that reference the visual language of my late-twentieth century Midwestern childhood. Dollhouse furniture. A bedpost. China cabinet. I manipulate these found objects in order to question their original purpose and the narratives they remind me of and to confront my own ambivalence toward power and commodified desire. The implicit suggestion of a happy ending in everyday American experience is suggested in retirement ads, children’s toys and clothing, television shows and movies. Disney regularly comes out with new princesses and remakes the old, drawing in old and new audiences alike and recreates believable versions of “Once Upon A Time” that ...

Madison LaVallee, a fellow graduate student in mixed media at SUNY Albany, and I collaborated this last week to create an interactive installation. We called it Surrogate Place.... Make It Your own. The exhibition involved three stages, or sets, designed to operate as domestic interiors. We created specifically three shared spaces of a home; a kitchen, outdoor space, basement, and living room. In perfect Project Runway fashion, we then provided an accessory wall and "domestic directives" for groups and individuals to follow for specific allotted times. The project was design as a research project for us, but also as something the viewer could relate to and take home with them. Why do we place things in the places we do? Where do our things really belong? How does your understanding of an object shape the way it is used or misused? Video and photos of the manipulated spaces to follow!

"Back of House" That Thing Deserves it's Own Theme Song Rear View That Shit is Like Black Man's Kryptonite Just Like Two Big Bags of Candy Daddy Can Stretch It Out For You So its been while, I have made some pretty big changes. Before I share those changes (hopefully soon) I thought I should share the final resolution of the chairs. The final project was a installation the was titled "Back of House," riffing off of the name for the kitchen in a restaurant as well as a reference to Ass. Yes, that's ass with a capital "A." While installing I listened to Sarah Silverman, Amy Schumer, and Mindy Kaling just to give myself a boost of confidence and humor. That was the tricky line with this work. I constantly was questioning the thin line between flattery and sexual harassment and how to keep humor in the work so viewers wouldn't walk away only feeling depressed or saddened by the language. The issue of sexual harassme...

So.... Whew... We are hitting the end if my third semester in grad school- and it's been a whirlwind. I am finding out I am glad this is a three year program and not anything less- not sure I could have done it in two... I wanted to show you an installation from a guerrilla show we did on campus in the sculpture building. This was a group show with some of my favorite pals, we have to come to call our artist collective the Bootgang. I used the opportunity to make the largest installation I have made to date. This apparently does not mean the best- bigger isn't always better. Critiques of this piece have mostly been about superficial confusion. Much talk has been about prop making, micro and macro understanding of my own narrative. Basically, I didn't give the viewers enough to dig into, but they were impressed by scale and ambition. This is not exactly what an artist wants to hear, but it is a learning point.  So without and further ado, the best learning expe...

Some of you may remember the paintings from my last "781" post... Comments on them ranged from sadness, laughter, and thoughts about rap lyrics. In reality, the language was in reference to my body; said by my coworkers. As an artist I do not feel it is my job to point fingers, but instead call attention. In the calling to the forefront of thought, it is cathartic for me to get rid of the jumble of words that bouncing around my head that has been thrown at me. Whether or not we want to talk about it sexual harassment has long term effects on the recipient. The chairs are a stand in for the human. A viewer can understand them in shape, form, weight, and use. The words that were spoken are scared, stitched, and burnt into the chairs themselves- almost as a violation of their natural state, a way of defacing their surface. I tried to repeat the words said to me in ways that would either make them irrelevant or unrecognizable to their original meaning. For example, spending t...

For  long time I have been messing around with poetry and the way language functions as an art form. I do not believe this is profound, but here are a few word banks that I have been operating from. These two are about specific pieces and processes that have been posted already so as to not repeat myself no images today! childhood, faith,  narrative, mess, head,  heart,  home, sex, gender, history, narrative, story, femininity, responsibility, grass, story, family, fear boogie man,  story, fear,  growing,  graffiti,  discard,  knitting,  weaving,  belonging,  fairy tale, dirt,  stains,  history,  sleep,  sex,  thread,  tail,  trail,  body,  destruction I believe with all that I am that breaking down the wall between artist and viewer is at the center of making good art. So I hope that as I continue...

Lovely way of describing my process I know... I had and have a wonderful mentor and friend who once told me that my strength was in my absorption and fairly rapid "regurgitation." I am sure that Ari said it more elegantly than that, but you get the picture. So, in the constant stimulus, ebb and flow of living I have come full circle at the end of my first year in grad school. The newer things you will see on this post seem to be the summation of things learned in New York. Warning: some of these images have a slightly sensitive nature- in that they deal with sexual harassment, female identity, and body image. I give you a warning only because my work has centered around play and production and construction of identity- so these things may seem vulgar. And indeed they are- the small paintings contain short phrases that men have said to me since moving to the east coast. As for the rest- some writing about them will follow later this week!