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Jesus Morales is a sculptor based out of NYC.

The first time I saw Jesus’ images they were printed large scale on standard issue luster paper. Created as a huge file, they were nearly impossible to see as a whole image in proximity. The images negated laws of composition and fell into one plane, an expanse that if not stopped by the printer’s capacity could keep going and encompass all.

In UNION’s digital space they are unbound and at the administration of the viewer, stuck in both an endless searching and a grounding deceleration.

NL: In beginning to look at the images on this page, I am immediately drawn to their texture and the moments in which the process is partially uncovered. I’m curious about what the image-making process could look like.

JM: I like using the technologies of image processing incorrectly because it’s there that the coolest stuff happens. I play with pushing the shadows too far, exporting small and printing large, embossing the highlights of an image, and running every filter available to see what begins to happen with the layering of effects. Sometimes images I like come out of this process.
I like working with lots of different kinds of images on different aesthetic, political, and conceptual registers. I tend to start with a photograph that has been captured by a lens. Traditional photo editing (color correcting, shadows, tones) stresses me out so when I edit my images they move towards different degrees of abstraction, often to the point of complete deconstruction, where the original is completely unrecognizable. I really double down on the fact that I don’t know how to do things that well.
A lot of the images I make are layered with found images and screenshots. I think having them included articulates more pointedly an idea about them existing in a mass ecology of images, fighting for attention, communication, and influence.

NL: This is absolutely a generative deconstructive process; in refusing to acknowledge formal training there are by-products that result in these images. There is the unlearning of editing and technologies in order to produce images that in essence have always existed, because the raster data has always been present, but never forefronted.

JM: Yeah exactly. I also think that in the hierarchy of cultural production, the newest and most interesting things come from the margins. [1] In the digital space, this takes the form of co-option of the misuse of technologies.

NL: It is possible to ground yourself in some of the points of the images, for example the white spots share a visual relationship to lens flares and overexposure but then the rest of the image kind of throws you into the dark. In this case, do you think these are throwing the viewer into chaos?

JM: There are a dizzying number of images, ideas, etc. in the world, inundating your sight line. I want to illustrate this chaotic excess of material and meaning in contemporary life. Over-saturated glossy whisps describe flows of information, emulating lorenzo orbits, over a black void. All referents are rendered equally as abstract; there is no aspect more demanding of attention in the image than any other. I want people to look as closely or lazily as they want. The looker is too tired from work, instagram and otherwise, to begin to think about the specificity of meaning in my art, or the precarity of their life.... The viewer is already in chaos, in free fall. [2] Looking at this image, clicking and dragging at their own pace I hope gives them something to focus on so they don’t get seasick.

NL: In chaos there is concealment, and although the images in this digital project do provide some sort of grounding in the agency it gives to the viewer to search, there is something left hidden by the editing process.

JM: The process of abstraction on these images is a concealing process. Removing the representational aspects of the photography and bringing out the abstract forms is a way of concealing, but also of revealing the affective properties of the image. The thing that I think should be left untouched is representation in and of itself. The history of optical capture is extremely violent and disturbing. Not taking a photograph or concealing it is a way of protecting whatever is being represented. Leaving things unaccounted for, unmeasured, etc, is a way of protecting something from being exploited. The history of lens-based ‘looking’ since the Renaissance is intrinsic to the history of extraction and capitalism. The apparatus of the camera can never be unlinked from this history. I wonder about whether using these technologies incorrectly and excessively can produce something truer which begins to acknowledge a more insidious aspect to making and sharing photos.

NL: The click-and drag navigation method of Google Maps is a tool for unrestricted access to spaces, it allows the viewer to engage and disengage at their will. In the early stages of this project we were going back and forth on how the visitor would move through this expanse, what felt right about the click-and-drag?

JM: For some reason I didn’t even realize I could reproduce the click-and-drag gesture of Google Maps for this project. My initial intention was to have it run on an animation loop that I choreographed. It felt right because there is an agency in the person's navigation of the image. You can go slowly and ponder or just fuck around and move through it sporadically. There is room for a desire to explore in whoever is engaging with the site.

NL: In agency, the viewer is regaining their stability, moving away from the saturation of images and towards something that they can sit and look into by square inch. Square inches – always free to look through – are slowed down by the dragging parameters amongst other things.

JM: With most things in the world they are all mediated by similar conditions and structures. Time, space. So yeah, the viewer is “still free-falling” and is always in free fall. And although they push us into the fall, they can also be looked at to create the grounds and terms to situate ourselves in. As much as I lament capitalism’s relentless ability to measure and produce value from the world in increasingly abstract, violent, and psychotic ways, chaos is a beacon of hope for me. It remains an incalculable being who rejects the notion of a calculable and predictable future, the wrench in capital’s plot to dissolve everything into air.

Interview by Nicole Lindner.

1. Aria Dean, “Poor Meme, Rich Meme,” Real Life , July 25, 2016, https://reallifemag.com/poor-meme-rich-meme/)
2. Hito Steyerl, “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective,” e-flux.com (e-flux, April 2011), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/24/67860/in-free-fall-a-thought-experiment-on-vertical-perspective/)