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Jo Whaley
Photography
American
(Sacremento, California, 1953 - )


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Biography

Jo Whaley’s photographs embrace the old with the new to create visually compelling interpretations of traditional themes that speak to the contemporary world with arresting clarity. Drawing inspiration from 17th-century European still-life painting, Whaley creates captivating images in which everything is not as it seems. Enticingly familiar and yet strangely unnerving, Whaley’s works engage elements of painting, sculpture, and theater in order to create a dialogue with the viewer. Her photographs, which are layered with meaning and given to multiple levels of interpretation, explore the anxieties inherent in the relationships among science, technology, and the natural world.

A native of California, Whaley has deep roots in the Bay Area. At the University of California, Berkeley, she earned an M.A. in visual design and photography, and an M.F.A. in art. Initially trained as a painter, Whaley shifted her focus to photography, recognizing that the camera was better suited to her artistic goals. At a time when her contemporaries were consumed with minimalism, Whaley sought to capture the tangible world, and she believed this was more easily achieved through the photographic image. Significantly, however, Whaley chose not to abandon painting. She sensed a natural flow between painting and photography and sought to incorporate both into her work.1 Following graduation from Berkeley, Whaley worked as a scenic artist for the Zellerbach Playhouse in Berkeley, the San Francisco Opera Company, and the San Francisco Ballet. This experience plays a vital role in her image making, enabling the artist to create balance between truth and fantasy in her work.

Navigating the space between painting and photography, Whaley’s images call forth both mediums in their quiet interplay of sensuality and veracity. This interaction is nowhere more evident than in Atomic Tea Party III from the series Natura Morta. Taking its name from the Italian phrase for still life, literally translated as “dead nature,” the works in Natura Morta recast traditional still-life paintings in a new, more revealing light. Using found objects from flea markets and produce purchased from farmer’s markets, Whaley constructs elaborate tableaux in her studio, which she then carefully lights and photographs with a four-by-five-inch view camera. Modeled on 17th-century Dutch, Spanish, and Italian works, many of the pieces in Natura Morta quote these paintings directly. Others, like Atomic Tea Party III, are characterized by a more subtle reference.

Traditionally, still-life paintings rely on objects from everyday life to create allegorical images representing human mortality and the transience of worldly pleasure. Whaley’s photographs also speak of vulnerability and mortality, but her message is much more contemporary in its focus. Through a compelling juxtaposition of incongruous elements, she suggests that there is something askew in man’s relationship to nature. In Atomic Tea Party III, the artist alludes to Dutch still-life painters with her inclusion of a peeled lemon. But, flanked by a menacing, industrial-looking tea set, the lemon becomes almost insignificant in this apocalyptic scene. Whaley frames the tableau with a densely painted backdrop. Rendered in deep reds, oranges, and dark grays, the artificial sky evokes anxiety and dread. The inclusion of theatrical lighting serves to intensify the feeling of doom as the viewer fully engages in this “radioactive” image. Whaley’s clever interplay between real and artificial seems to reinforce the work’s central query: what, ultimately, are the potential consequences of society’s greedy pursuit of scientifically enhanced technology? —L.W.

1. Jo Whaley, quoted in Elizabeth A. Johnson, “Jo Whaley: Natura Morta,” View Camera Magazine, March/April 1994, 26.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)

Jo Whaley was born in Sacramento and has lifelong roots in the Bay Area. At UC Berkeley, she earned four degrees – a B.A. and M.A. in Art, an M.A. in Visual Design/Photography, and an M.F.A. (Master of Fine Art). Whaley originally studied to become a painted, putting her abilities to work as a scenic artist for the San Francisco Opera and Ballet companies and the Zellerbach Playhouse at UC Berkeley.  Since the early 1980s, Whaley’s photographs have been exhibited in the U.S., Europe, and Japan, at institutions including the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and SFMOMA.  Her work is in various public and private collections.  SJMA’s Jo Whaley: Natura Morta was the artist’s first major solo museum exhibition.  Whaley has been a lecturer at San Jose State University since 1986 and currently divides her time between homes in Oakland and Santa Fe. (SJMA Collections Committee, 2001)


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