Weird Tales

Mad genius is how one wants to describe the impulse that’s led Chicago artist Jessica Joslin to create a menagerie of beasts out of skulls and brass. And yet it’s not megalomania, but a love of nature and a firsthand knowledge of animal anatomy that bring her creations to life.

Years’ worth of scrounging junk shops, flea markets, hardware stores, and old attics has yielded a pack rat’s horde of car parts and musical instruments, antique brassware and opera gloves. A wall of drawers in her studio contains fish scales, umbrella tips, glass eyes, universal ball joints, tiny bolts, miniature springs.

And then there are the skulls. Some are real bone, obtained from dealers in osteological specimens, and some are only replicas as clever as Joslin’s creations themselves. She strives to make it impossible to tell which are real and which are not. In fact, the overall impression one gets from her animals, no matter how piecemeal or whimsical, is one of reality.

The assembly can take weeks, even months. In the depths of her studio, Joslin transforms the unlikely materials into creatures so plausible that one cannot imagine them reduced to their component parts. The almost Nouveau lines of their skeletal forms are lively, even when wrought of the most strange and inorganic of materials. A brass-boned dog in a leather harness raises one paw, his dark eyes eager to please, tail all but wagging. Caught in mid-swing, a monkey seems about to reach up to grab the next brass branch. The creatures always appear on the brink of motion.

On close examination, one realizes they are. Since welding would destroy the delicate patina on the antique parts, Joslin painstakingly joins them together with tiny bolts, springs, and couplings. The technique allows for all sorts of surprises: beaks open, tails flex, necks bend and jaws part. Some of Joslin’s surprisingly sturdy beasts are freestanding and poseable. And like all animals, they are not always well-behaved: The artist has admitted that more than one of her creations has bitten her.

Yet these are clearly not mongrels spawned in a post-apocalyptic junk pile — these well-groomed creatures rest comfortably on upholstered cushions, wearing ruffs of silk and velvet. Their brass armatures are lovingly burnished, their white bones covered with filigree and ornamented with jewels and gewgaws. These are pampered luxury pets for the aristocrats of a world fashioned from the remnants of our own.

What began as a simple love for an ever-diminishing natural world has seemingly grown to encompass a parallel love of the discarded, a desire to use what has been left behind. There is a comparison to be made to taxidermy — but even the best taxidermy lacks the animation shown by these composite beasts, which don’t in any way give the impression of being inanimate or dead. Joslin’s creatures lack nothing; she has not preserved something vanished, but created something new: “I make my beasts because they are what I dreamed of discovering, but they didn’t exist anywhere, so I had to make them myself.”  — AMANDA GANNON

Jessica’s work can be viewed online at www.jessicajoslin.com, and her new book, Strange Nature, is now available from the Lisa Sette Gallery.

Tags: Interviews + Features

This entry was posted on Monday, October 20th, 2008 at 11:48 pm and is filed under The Bazaar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.