Jane Waggoner Deschner: Remember Me

Jane Waggoner Deschner: Remember Me by Aline SmithsonJune 21, 2025

©Jane Waggoner Deschner, Soldier and Sibs, from Memoji Mori

A few months ago I had the great pleasure of attending The Month of Photography Denver, a massive celebration of photography that takes place every two years, spearheaded by the Colorado Photographic Arts Center. The city is ablaze with 100+ events, including exhibitions, artist talks, workshops. In addition, more than 75 participating spaces from museums to galleries to coffee shops feature 500+ exhibiting artists. It’s an incredible example of a city coming together to elevate all things photographic. At the heart of the event were the MOPD portfolio reviews, deftly produced by Samantha Johnston and her capable crew a CPAC.

I was delighted to meet Jane Waggoner Deschner and her work at the reviews, as I have jurored her work into exhibitions over the years and followed her ever evolving work. The artist has had yearly museum exhibitions of her massive collection of projects included in her traveling exhibition, Remember Me. She reinterprets found photographs, creating a personal language of text and image.

Today we feature two projects, Memoji Mori and 1-Word. An interview with the artist follows.

©Jane Waggoner Deschner, Boy and Canons, from Memoji Mori

Montana-based Jane Waggoner Deschner has been an exhibiting artist for over forty years; for over twenty years her medium has been the found family photograph. Her work has been shown in numerous venues including Robert Mann Gallery, NYC; University of Michigan–Dearborn; Missoula Art Museum, MT; Churchill Arts, Fallon, NV; and other national galleries and museums. Her immersive installation, “Remember me. a collective narrative in found words and photographs,” premiered at the Yellowstone Art Museum, MT, closing in January, 2023. It traveled through the Montana Art Gallery Directors Association to the Gallery of Fine Arts, University of Montana, and WaterWorks Museum in Miles City. In 2025 selections from it were installed at the Museum of Art | Fort Collins, CO. Her work has been juried into all three Kris Graves Projects photo books (“Solace,” “On Death” and “Of Covid: Collective Trauma”) and selected for photography exhibits by Los Angeles Center for Photography, Candela Books + Gallery, Humble Arts Foundation, Lenscratch, Midwest Nice Art, The Curated Fridge, Photo Trouvée and others. The Montana Arts Council chose her for an Artist Innovation Award in 2019–20, an ARPA grant in 2022 and a Strategic Investment Grant in 2025.

She has participated in numerous residencies across the US and in Canada, including Anderson Ranch Arts Center, CO; Ucross Foundation, WY; The Banff Centre, AB, CA; Atlantic Center for the Arts, FL; Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, VA; and Santa Fe Art Institute, AZ. Time spent working in these unique places forms an important part of her practice.

She earned an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2002. After growing up in Kansas, she moved to Montana in 1977. In addition to being a mixed media artist, she works as an exhibition installer, graphic designer, photographer, curator, instructor and picture framer.

Instagram: @janedeschner1

©Jane Waggoner Deschner, Grim Family, from Memoji Mori

Memoji Mori

Disappointing experiences and unmet expectations of “happy family” have zigzagged through my life. My mother’s parents didn’t raise her. I don’t know why. When I was 13, she died after a three-year-long illness — no one told me that was going to happen. Nine months later my father married a widow he’d met seven months earlier. I divorced before reaching forty, necessitating shared custody of two young children and causing an overall upheaval in the assumptions I realized I’d held about my life.

All this led to my fascination with early and mid-twentieth century vernacular photographs; the found family photo became my medium in 2002. Nan Goldin wrote, “The snapshot (is) the form of photography that is most defined by love. People take them out of love, and they take them to remember — people, places, and times. They’re about creating a history by recording a history.”

I’ve spent many years “making friends with death” because I learned at a young age that it can happen any time to any one. In my “memoji mori series” I hand-embroider skeleton hands into vernacular photos. Their gestures are familiar because they are based on hand emojis. I create a juxtaposition of a commonplace photo with an expressive hand gesture, encouraging the viewer to decipher possible meanings. Dia de los Muertos, the vibrant celebration of both life and death with its most ubiquitous symbol, the skeleton, has inspired and consoled me for many years.

Photos used are archival digital prints (the larger pieces) and actual vintage ones. Thread is primarily DMC cotton floss with metallic and rayon occasionally added. Each is stitched by hand — an intimate and meditative practice for me.

When I collaborate with another’s photo, I tease out a common humanity not confined by time, place or circumstance. I explore our shared human condition to better understand my own.

©Jane Waggoner Deschner, Daddy, from Memoji Mori

Tell us about your growing up and what brought you to photography….

I grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, in the 1950s and early 1960s. It was a small university town and my father was Dean of the College of Liberal Arts. I had the succession of cameras we all had back then: a Brownie, then various Instamatics. I wasn’t an artist or photographer, but I always made stuff. Urban geography was my major in college and grad school.

In 1977, pregnant with my second child, I moved to Montana with a husband who had a job. When she turned 3, I decided to go back to college and try for a second BA in art. Seven years later, taking one art class a quarter, I graduated the same semester my divorce was final. My medium was photomontage, photos found in slick magazines.

©Jane Waggoner Deschner, Lost Little Girl, from Memoji Mori

What compelled you to work with found photographs?

When I was approaching 50, I decided I wanted to make “better art” so began a low residency MFA program at Vermont College. My last semester started in August 2001 with the thesis show scheduled February 2002. Then 9.11. It’s “easy” to make art about how evil something is, but more difficult to be reminded what good still exists. My thesis show was “The Anchor Project.” I asked friends, family, colleagues, fellow students and faculty, to send me a snapshot of someone/something/someplace that anchored them. I received over 200 photos which I scanned and returned. There were very few photos of what consumer culture tells us is important—overwhelmingly I saw family, pets, friends, special places, etc. To make artworks, I Photoshopped the scanned photos onto snapshots I took of my refrigerator. My thesis show was eight 36”h x 22”w digital printouts/posters, just thumbtacked to the gallery walls. Every day the project brought me joy and I fell in love with the sincere humanity of the found family photograph.

©Jane Waggoner Deschner, Scouts Salute, from Memoji Mori

How did you begin collecting photographs? Is your archive enough now?

In 2002, I began buying large lots on eBay, then became acquainted with a few dealers who sold to collectors and were happy to sell to me cheaply the ones the collectors weren’t interested in. Over several years I made four trips to LaPorte, Indiana, to go through the 50,000+ studio portrait proofs abandoned by Frank Pease, a commercial photographer in the 1940s–70s. I bought about 4,000 of them. Now I don’t actively buy; I have probably ±70,000 snapshots, studio portraits (finals and proofs), news photos, slides and movie lobby photos. But I never turn down someone who offers me photos they don’t want. Even if I never use any of them, I want the person to recognize that family photographs have value.

©Jane Waggoner Deschner, from Memoji Mori

How did you develop your methodologies?

I look for ways to show viewers how invaluable vernacular photos can be. The wisdom I find in these three quotes guides me.

Nan Goldin: “The snapshot (is) the form of photography that is most defined by love. People take them out of love, and they take them to remember — people, places, and times. They’re about creating a history by recording a history.”

Susan Sontag: “Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.”

Christian Boltanski: “I don’t want viewers to discover; I want them to recognize.”

I’ve looked at thousands and thousands of found photos.

By interacting in some way with a photo, I find a way to make it, and others like it, interesting. If I’m successful, that intervention becomes a series. In my “silhouette series” I illustrate common snapshot themes, for example couples standing next to their car.

“Remember me. a collective narrative in found words and photos” is my effort to show, in these divisive times, that more connects than separates us. I began it in 2015, stitching sentences copied from obituaries written by loved ones into found photos of others that I felt fit. I’ve stitched over 1200. They developed into an immersive museum installation.

I “work” a lot with death, beginning with other people’s discarded photos. As Sontag wrote: “All photographs are memento mori.” I think I make work that incorporates and destigmatizes death, through familiarity, often using humor.

My latest series “memoji mori” juxtaposes a snapshot with a skeleton hand stitched in a hand emoji gesture.

©Jane Waggoner Deschner, Man on Beach, from Memoji Mori

You’ve had a number of museum exhibitions lately, what has been the reaction of the viewers?

The reactions of viewers to “Remember me. a collective narrative in found words and photos” is all that I hoped and more! I wanted to remind folks that we are more alike than different; more connects us than separates us. A few reactions from the guest book:

Joy in Fort Collins: “Delightful, cleaver, thought and laughter provoking”

Allen from Saskatchewan: “A profound document about humanity.”

Dana from New Jersey: “obsessively crazed & cool!”

Susan from Billings: “Blown away. Kept expecting to see my family.”

Keah from Missoula: “Truly reflects the upagainstedness of being human together. So joyful so difficult.”

Betsey sent me an email from her home in Indiana after seeing the show in Billings: “How you created work that is both thoughtful and poignant yet still light is refreshing. Your work is so life affirming.”

I just worked for a week (June 6–12) as an artist-in-residence stitching in the galleries of the “Pop! Goes the West” special exhibition at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West museum in Cody, Wyoming. The last day, a woman who is a highly respected gallery owner and museum patron, sat down to talk to me. She told me that my “Remember me.” installation was the best museum exhibition she had ever seen. She went twice, once spending over five hours one Sunday reading every piece. That brought tears to both our eyes.

©Jane Waggoner Deschner, Sisters, from Memoji Mori

Remember me.

I began working on the project, Remember me: a collective narrative in found words and photographs, in 2015, to respond to what she experienced as the “caustic tone arising in our country.” Since then, I have hand-embroidered over twelve hundred found photographs with quotes from obituaries written by anonymous family and friends.

The photographs span the decades of popular black and white photography, chronicling people, places and times. While studio portraits tend toward intentional self-representation, family snapshots often capture random, unintended elements. Obituaries, written by loved ones, are a form of familial self-representation and collective memory. Their shared anecdotes and mottoes highlight noteworthy aspects of an individual’s life.

I carefully pair each vernacular photo with obituary text written about a different person. The photos ‘read’ the texts and vice versa, teasing pretension, tragi-comedy and profound truths about the human condition from sentimental artifacts. We see our personal truths reflected, through photos and words, in the lives of others. The immersive installation is both humorous and poignant, weighted by an accumulation of personal stories that span and connect across time and place.

The viewer continually shifts their awareness between the facial expressions and vintage styles represented in individual images, the content of the stitched tributes, the details of the stitching, and the overall installation. Accompanied by mid-century furniture, knickknacks, and mounds of found hand-crocheted doilies and afghans, the installation alludes to the familiar spaces of homes and offices. The repetition of standard frames and hand-stitched texts imposes a formal framework that contains and unites the sentimental artifacts. This accumulation of collected and remixed memories calls attention to the universal aspects of human experience.

©Jane Waggoner Deschner, f(r)iction), 1-word Poems

Who and what is inspiring you lately?

When I need inspiration—or affirmation that what I’m doing has value—I return to Barthes’ “Camera Lucida” and Christian Boltanski’s artwork. Intellect and emotion.

Lately these inspirations have emerged as emoji skeleton hands and the impossible-to-guarantee-in-real-life “happily ever after” of romance novels.

I’m just finding a place in the photo world. I attended my first in-person portfolio reviews this March at CPAC in Denver. My work was totally different from everyone else’s there. I received an incredible amount of encouragement from the reviewers.

My underlying motivation doesn’t change…illustrate our common humanity.

©Jane Waggoner Deschner, (obediants), 1-word Poems

I’m always curious how artists handle the sales of original hand sewn photographs, do you sell copies or re-stitch each photograph?

I have sold or donated an inkjet print or two of a stitched photo. But each original stitched photo is unique. I’m not represented by a gallery so haven’t been asked to edition pieces. If a piece is accepted into a show, I price it as a framed one-of-a-kind. However, I have reused a particularly good photo as the base for different stitched images. It’s hard for me to let go of work, but then I look around and see how many I have, how I constantly make more, and it’s easier. I just need the outside world to want it see it.

What’s next for you?

I continue to stitch every day. It’s what centers me and also what gives me a way to send my thoughts and feelings out into the world.

I’m working on finding places to continue to show “Remember me.” The installation is composed of a series of themed sections so can adapt to a variety of venues. The “nuts/food” section is in the exhibition, “We Are What,“ at Intersect Arts in St. Louis this summer. Unfortunately, the reason I created the exhibition remains relevant.

I’m learning about making photo books/zines. I was told in Denver that my “Remember me.” catalog is not a photo book. A photo book or zine is more poetic. For me, to be poetic is a challenge.

I feel the horizon coming closer and closer. Hence an urgency to make/do/show as much as I can…before I can’t any longer.