As an American consumer, as well as an American photographic artist, I realized I had a distinct responsibility to reflect on my own habits of consumption, to acknowledge how I was personally contributing to the overall equation and to share my observations in a way that encouraged viewers to recognize their own lives within my work. — Jennifer Bucheit
Every time I get a box from Amazon, I think about the strain on resources that my box, combined with millions of other boxes, are creating on our environment–just the tip of the iceberg of how we have ravaged our planet for our own convenience. Photographic artist, Jennifer Bucheit has taken a hard look at her own consumption and consumer habits. Focusing on paper waste, Jennifer rephotographs the containers we use every day and visually abstracts the objects, then prints these interpretations of the container back onto the original packaging. Her series, Again & Again: A Reflection on Consumer Culture speaks to the materiality of the the original product and creates a thoughtful reconsideration of, well….trash.
Jennifer’s work was recently accepted into Catherine Edelman’s online gallery “The Chicago Project,” which is dedicated to both new and established Chicago area photographers that the gallery feels deserve recognition and further exposure. She will also be having a solo exhibition of her series Again & Again: A Reflection on Consumer Culture in August of 2020 at the Sugar Row Gallery in Mineral Point, WI. Opening reception is August 1, 2020.
Jennifer Bucheit is a fine art photographer living in Wisconsin. She grew up in Iowa and received her BA in Journalism and BFA in Graphic Design from the University of Iowa and her MFA in Photography from Academy of Art University. Her work has been exhibited widely in the Midwest area as well as in juried national exhibitions. She is the recipient of several photography honors including The Chicago Project with the Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago and the Juror’s Award of Merit in the 2013 International Fine Art Photography competition.
Her background in both design and narrative fields continues to inform the photographic imagery she creates today. Her work is rooted in the visual language of abstraction and formal experimentation, yet within her dynamic compositions lay recognizable everyday content that comments on issues surrounding consumerism in today’s society.
Bucheit firmly believes in the photographic medium, over any other, to provide her viewers with a gratifying visual experience that simultaneously reflects on our contemporary human condition.
AGAIN and AGAIN: A Reflection on Consumer Culture
Humans are creatures of habit: we eat, we drink, we work, we play, we sleep, we wake up the next day—and do it all again. Along the way we invent and manufacture an abundance of products for purchase and consumption, generating remarkable amounts of waste as we attempt to make our daily living as convenient as possible.
Again & Again: A Reflection on Consumer Culture is a fine art photographic series that presses the pause button on my own incessant cycles of contemporary consumption. Due to its significant contribution to global gas emissions, paper waste is used as a case study for the project: after use, but before hitting the landfill, my family’s paper packaging is collected, deconstructed, and photographed in a still life setting. These images are digitally composited and then printed directly back onto the interior side of the original packaging itself.
The repurposed paper waste provides a moment of visual clarity, presenting material evidence of my family’s habitual consumer behavior intertwined with the everyday human condition. Photographic language of formal abstraction, layering and repetitive compositional elements, reinforce the manufactured nature of the subject matter; while random textures, torn edges and smeared inks, evoke reminders of paper’s organic origins.
The series is intended to be both aesthetically engaging and socially revealing, challenging conventional ideas of what we consider art, and what we consider expendable. It offers opportunity to reflect on the environmental consequences of our present-day consumption, while simultaneously retaining hope in the extraordinary capacity of human ingenuity.
