Rachel Jump: Origins

Rachel Jump: Origins by Aline SmithsonNovember 14, 2015

©Rachel Jump

I first met Rachel Jump when we shared a week at the Maine Media Workshops this summer. She spent the year as a studio assistant to Arno Minkkinen and was in Camden to help with his workshop. Several months later, we reconnected at the Filter Photo Festival in Chicago, where she is now living. Rachel is an insightful and committed photographer, creating images that are personal, intimate, and nuanced. Tonight she opens an exhibition of her project, Origins, at Alibi Fine Art in Chicago that will run through December 24, 2015.

Rachel Jump is an art photographer currently based in the Chicago area. Her black and white images explore themes addressing ideas of home, belonging, memory, and absence, and have been exhibited throughout the United States.

She graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design (BFA PH’14), where she received the Harry Koorejian Memorial Scholarship in 2013 and the Haining Family Scholarship in 2012. Her photographs are a part of the RISD Museum Special Collections, where she was also a visiting artist in conjunction with the exhibition, America in View: Landscape Photography 1865 to Now, in 2012. Rachel has taught at the Nantucket Island School of Design and the Arts and Maine Media Workshops + College and spent the last year working as a studio assistant for the photographer, Arno Rafael Minkkinen. She will have a solo exhibition at Alibi Fine Art in Chicago, Illinois later this fall.

©Rachel Jump

“Art is not pleasure, but a means of union among people, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for life and progress towards well-being of individuals and of humanity.” -Leo Tolstoy

Origins

These images bear witness to my family’s severance from home.

For most of my childhood our lives were scattered over countless households. My disparate memories of these places merely composed a fragmented idea of home. Later in life I began to question how my identity was shaped without a point of origin. Photography provided a way in which I could eternalize these fleeting moments, a fiction entangled by my truth. As a way to cope with these feelings of isolation, I created a narrative hoping to connect these places and reunite my family. Through this collective experience, my family and I appear to search for one another within the various environments that divided us. As a result of our efforts to find solace and intimacy, I conjured a myth of a home; a sanctuary where my loved ones and I could finally belong.

My photographs are relics of loss; traces of a family that I tried to piece back
together.