Photo by Justin Lawrence
Jessica Thalmann is a Toronto-based artist, curator and writer currently working Gallery Assistant at the Doris McCarthy Art Gallery and Gallery Attendant at Toronto International Film Festival's Contemporary Art Gallery. She currently holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Arts from York University and has held curatorial and editorial internships at C Magazine and the Art Gallery of York University. Her work has exhibited at various galleries including Gallery 1313, Paul Petro Special Projects, the Arts and Letters Club, Sleeping Giant Gallery and The Artist Project. She was also published in the Magenta Foundation's Flash Forward Emerging Photographers of 2010.
Departing from Marianne Hirsch's concept of "postmemory" as a means to understand the complexities of the memories of the children (and grandchildren) of Holocaust survivors, my photographic practice aims to explore this notion of postmemory in a very personal way. As a grandchild of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust, I experience the lingering effects of traumatic historical events that preceded my birth as a third generational witness.
In Projections and Abjections, I focused on notions of personal narratives/histories as they grow over time, and how displacement and time affects memory. Using family albums as inspiration and analog photography as my medium, I also wanted to explore the nature of a photo-based medium and its effects on memory and trauma. What is the value of photographs if they act as documents of trauma, happiness and change?