CICA Museum, M Gallery
January 17 – 21, 2024
2024.01.17 – 21
Nine Mothers
My work is driven by personal experience and its connection to contemporary and historical issues. Overall, my work addresses the complexities and intricacies of labor, care, and identity in our current culture. I seek to make challenging experiences accessible to those without the same somatic knowledge while still engaging in conversation and confrontation. In my practice, I incorporate layered, labor intensive drawings, collage, sculpture, performance, et al, into fully realized mixed media works and immersive installations. Within my work, the viewer is met with bodily experiences that mirror the complexities of the stories I share, with a focus on shared knowledge, awareness, empathy, and change.
My ongoing body of work, Tired Bodies, include figurative, soft sculptures that are distorted and exaggerated in various ways that reflect their experiences. Tired Bodies are meant to take up space, despite fatigue caused by the expectations placed on them both physically and mentally in our culture and society. This series mostly involves human-scale soft sculptures and installation environments where they reside but there is material experimentation, and the series incorporates smaller sculptures, drawings, paintings, stop motion animation, among other things. In the beginning, Tired Bodies were mostly concerned with labor and fatigue. Over time they have become ways to talk about gender norms, sexuality, body image, ableism, community, care, rest, and motherhood. With even more time, Tired Bodies have become something humorous, resisting much of the normative demands forced on them by the culture they inhabit through their strangeness. They are failing, but in so many ways, they are resisting those demands through their resting, soft, diminished frames. Their failure is an act of resistance: Resisting the dominant culture and its expectations. My recent work for this series includes a public installation that incorporated an 85-foot-long soft sculpture tired body and processional durational performances and then the installation of that work in another space, adapted to fit the constraints of a new environment.
Born 1986, Jacksonville, Florida
Jessica Caldas is a Puerto Rican American, Georgia and Florida based artist. Her work connects personal and community narratives, usually centered on the experiences of women and women identifying folks, to larger themes and social issues through bodily, multidisciplinary works. Caldas has participated in numerous artist residencies, including The Creatives Project from 2018-2019, Vermont Studio Center in 2020, and was the Art on the Atlanta Beltline AIR in 2020-2021. She is a 2022-2023 MOCA GA Working Artist Project fellow. Caldas was awarded The Center for Civic Innovations 2016 Creative Impact award and named Creative Loafing’s Best of ATL Artist for 2016 and 2015 for her performance and community work. She received the City of Atlanta Office of Cultural Affairs Emerging Artist Award in Visual Arts for 2014 and was a finalist for the Forward Arts Foundation’s Emerging Artist Award in 2014. Her work has been featured at Burnaway, ArtsAtl, and more and has been shown at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA, at the Art & History Museums of Maitland, and is included in the collections of Kilpatrick Townsend, The City of Atlanta Office of Cultural Affairs, and the Kyoto International Community House.
Caldas received her MFA at Georgia State University in 2019 and received her BFA in printmaking from the University of Georgia in 2012. She is a part of Living Melody Collective, a multidisciplinary collective of femme artists that is based in Atlanta but is also nomadic along the East coast and throughout the Southeast. She currently runs Good News Arts, a small community arts space and gallery in rural North Central Florida.
