The MOCA GA Working Artist Project (WAP) is an awards program to support established visual artists of merit who reside in the metropolitan Atlanta area. This initiative provides an unparalleled level of support for individual artists, expands the Museum’s mission, and promotes Atlanta as a city where artists can live, work, and thrive. As a part of this prize MOCA GA provides each Working Artist Project award recipient with a production of a full-color exhibition solo catalog. MOCA GA pays an arts writer to create an accompanying essay for the catalogue.
Essay by Danielle Deadwyler, 2023:
“There is laughter in hell.” Esther Perel (quoting her father)
“It’s not possible to constantly hold onto crisis. You have to have the love and you have to have the magic. That’s also life.” Toni Morrison
Mother is a metaphor. A murmur. Give. Take. Give. Receive. Creation is a simile. Like, mother; like, sister; like father; like, brother; like, family; like, blood. Take. Take. Take. And a legacy of births (something like creations…or, like, stages of coming) until it gives. Back. Magic.
Jessica Caldas’s Every Stage of Becoming is a myth molded of many. The many is multifold. Of herself, a self-described privileged artist all of her life, who has witnessed artists create on many levels. Of her family, an ever-supportive clan that berths her privilege as an artist, activist, mother (and functions as a part of Caldas’s performances, art; even in this exhibition). Of community, one of intuitive attraction in the form of artists (i.e. Caldas’s Living Melody Collective or her Florida based art gallery Good News); one as professional likenesses in activism and advocacy for women’s issues; and one of witnesses to the inelegant humour of humanity. For her MOCA exhibition as a Working Artist Project fellow, Caldas’s tired bodies loom grandiose in her architected home of nine installations, each correlative to a domestic space; however, they stand in as more than fleshy dark rose-colored matriarchal figures, limber, lanky and long from fatigue. These bodies and the homes/spaces they inhabit, extend and expand breasts and arms and legs, their limbs stretching toward something (or someone) like the many that have made Caldas’s life and labor.
Pink and red and rose color the pulse of Every Stage’s tired body figures, as well as the installations’ walls, some flat and vibrant with elegant design, like “A name can be in a lot of places at once (Helen)”. The tired body stretches out beyond a decagonal wooden bed frame, like a crib, like a cradle, for a “child”, for a “mother”, for a “sexual being”. Or, as in “I come honouring your power (Clytemnestra)”, fabric wallpaper of floral vibrancy textures this space, akin to a sitting room or bedroom, with the tired body draped longingly or defeatedly over the exaggerated multi-back chair, her “Frankenfurniture”, as Caldas calls it. The bodies and walls color a declaration of intimacy, vulnerability, and a desire for mercy and reprieve. Sanguine, is adjective and noun, Every Stage casts the color of our blood, our muscles, and our food into every drop of potential (self) being.
Though there is a looming nature to the limbs of these works and figures, abundance champions its many realities. Abundance, an optimistic giving. Fresh fruit offerings, like blood oranges, apples, and pomegranates, sit in ceramic bowls for visitors to share and consume. “In return for the good thing (Pandora)” boasts a tired body, with jeweled breasts and torso, positioned standing tall, only to fold forward at the neck, a light fixture illuminating in the place of a head, bowing and offering the fruit bowls beneath them. A refreshing of the food (also including strawberries, cherries, and peaches) occurred throughout the run of show, like an ongoing bacchanalia, a feasting on seedy, fuzzy, and juicy vegetation…there is always a possibility for more than what is given or in how the tired body seems to feel; always a place to languish, replenish. Then, “I have birthed so many sorrows (Jacosta)” invites more rest, and reflection. The tired body in this installation is the only soft sculpture laid flat upon the ground, their torso (like) a rug, limbs contorted all about. They cry to (anyone to) lay down (with me). Another invitation, in the form of 1200+ photocopies of blue and pink colored tired body figures on paper, offers those in the installation a hand in writing thoughts, et.al. and leaving them upon the wall, or for taking. Another complex giving (from the fleshy giants), a dynamic in relationship building Caldas never yields on. A taking of the viewer’s hand.
Every Stage of Becoming reveres the Creator, more specifically, the mother, the maker, not the mythic figure martyred for society, family and patriarchy. Mother is a much more abundant thinker, doer, and death and life bringer than that each tired body guffaws, limbs undulating at the hilarity of boundaries they cast themselves in and out of. A give and take. A choice. This home makes for a more playful historicity into mother(hood). One not of gender roles, but of gift economy, a term of ongoing investigation for Caldas. Therefore, family as leitmotif oxygenates the tired bodies, for Caldas finds an attraction to “duality”. As a twin herself, she knows there is a “complicated nature of how a body can possess many values”, a note that encourages the tired body to be read as more than mother, more than fatigued figure, more than laborer, more than martyr. “Positions 1-9” are figures that model a birth. Self, child, something other. Maybe a being, maybe a physical sexual expression. Maybe maybe maybe. They are a part of the smallest works in the exhibition, seeds for how to become.
Caldas, then, gives one of the greatest gifts of the small works, “The word for what I was did not exist (Circe)”, a relic of photographs and broken bisqueware, preserved flora, and a wall drawing and text by Caldas’s twin sister, Rae, smoking an echo of how becoming actually occurs. The photographs chant the history (or grieving) of The Endeavor, the original tired body from Caldas’s 2021 Atlanta Beltline Project. The first of these soft sculptures, the tired body took form and place in Atlanta’s public green space. The tired body, for Caldas, which originally began as line drawings, were to “hug” and “make me laugh” and “feel better”. Publicly, another outcome occurred for the original figure:
The Endeavor, beloved mother, left her place on April 23rd, 2021. Although only shortly a part of her community and space, she brought joy, happiness, confusion, and excitement in her brief time. Unfortunately, she also faced violence and had to be rescued from her place of rest by a loving and supportive community.
The Endeavor was meant for many things, including Labor, Failure, Death, Violence, Care, Community, Rest, and Love.
There is great humour in conducting funerary events for a lanky sculpture of parachute skins, whose soft puffy insides were tossed about by strangers (imaginably, with violence and glee). A recall to many a young child’s baby doll’s ultimate demise. And yet, Caldas does…gives us soft places to land, and even when corrupted, casts them to the fire (as depicted in the photographs of the enchanting Greek goddess named, “Circe”, work), and becomes again. And again. And again. And a give, and a take. Maybe maybe maybe, a myth a mother (an)other magic. Caldas only asks, “Can you go check on [her]? Can you save [her] for me?”
by Danielle Deadwyler, 2023.