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Jimena Diaz Jirash

Email: jdiazjirash@ecuad.ca

Studio: 18

Website: www.jimenadiaz.com

Bio:

Jimena Diaz Jirash (Mexico City, 1972).

She is a photo-based artist, currently working and studying her first year of the MFA program at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

Her art work investigates time, memory, anamnesis, and the corporeal expressed in photographs shot from small installations and actions, often times, performed with her own body.

Keywords of current practice:

  • Body
  • Anamnesis
  • Historical Multitudes
  • Involuntary Memory
  • Abject
  • Feminism
  • Photography

Research questions of current practice:

  • What does it mean to be a woman in a patriarchal cultural and social environment?
  • How does a woman internalize this knowledge?
  • Why understanding of ourselves is not only shaped by our experiences and how we live our lives within a specific context but also through experiences that have not been lived by us but by past generations? (The experience of anamnesis).

Studio actions:

For me, the development of a project always begins with a long research process that takes form through reading, films, visiting exhibitions, revisiting other artist’s work which I might consider related/relevant to the themes I am interested in developing and by letting all the information sink in with time or through long walks.

The information gathered through the research phase will form the core of my work. Once this step is taken, I will continue with a more intuitive phase. I make small installations or actions and capture their essence through photography. This part of the process is done without any assistance, using my own body whenever possible.

Once the photographs have been taken, the process continues by editing the images and printing.

Most of the times I shoot digitally. I edit using Lightroom and Photoshop and make archival pigment prints on Photo Rag Paper. However, I have also done digital negatives that I then use to make Cyanotypes and Platinum/Palladium Prints. I chose the printing method best suited for the project.

I have recently started incorporating collage and I am in the early stages of experimenting with encaustics as a form of achieving a more tactile form of editing that allows me to blur the image manually instead of digitally.