JEFF MUSSER | Questions of Identity

JEFF MUSSER | Questions of Identity

“Before a painting becomes a painting, I use my own photographs, my own drawings, and other source material to form a collage.
For me, the value of making collages comes from stitching together photos as a kind of fabric, extracting information, and then providing that cumulative information as a totally different package in the form of a painting.
This mode of working took on special relevance for me when I started to examine my own identity within the construct of race as an American living overseas in China from 2014-to 2016″.
– Jeff Musser

After graduating from The School Of The Art Institute Of Chicago, my first job was designing ‘Happy Meals’ for a ‘now defunct’ ad agency in Chicago. The job paid well, but I was artistically miserable. I learned very quickly that I could not be creative for someone else during the day and keep my painting practice going at night. Something had to give. When the rumor of layoffs within the agency started to circulate, I greeted the gossip with hope. When the layoffs became a reality, I was suddenly free to pursue my love of painting. On the downside, I now had to deal with surviving issues and how to overcome the much-romanticized notion of a starving artist. My artistic style has changed dramatically over the years, but my love for portraiture and narrative figurative painting has always been at the heart of my practice.

I am currently building a series of paintings, collages, and drawings that ask simple yet complicated questions: Why don’t white artists tackle issues of race? Why don’t white artists confront issues of racism, colonialism, and whiteness from the perspectives of being white? My work aims to examine whiteness from two vantages: a macro-historical view (what are its origins, what are its manifestations in the real world, how has whiteness morphed over time, who was allowed to be white and who was not) and a micro view (how has it affected my family and my personal outlook on the world.)

I also try to examine and deconstruct the notion of race as “something that is normal” by using aspects of the natural world in my work. For example, many of the plants depicted in the paintings are invasive species, but these plants now seem common and normal because they were brought to North America from Europe so long ago. Contrasted with invasive vegetation, I mix in common fruits and vegetables that were brought to America via enslaved people from Africa.

Read the full article in Art Market Magazine Issue #67 February 2022