^{Dario, 2022 (inkjet print, 45×60”)}

Jess T. Dugan, Love Pictures, and I’m right here with you

by Rebecca M. Alvin

There’s something about the water. How it reflects and refracts the light, its constant motion, the rivers, lakes, oceans—embodiments of something vast and powerfully present with all of these contradictions. “Bodies of water,” we call them, bodies that our own bodies can be enveloped by, soothed, awakened, washed, and refreshed. And like photography, they reflect our own selves back to us, both fluid and still as a Wellfleet pond, but never precisely the same as the day before.

“I’m really drawn to the water instinctually, but I also think of the water as a metaphor for human identity and experience, how, you know, bodies of water are always present and stable, they’re always there, in some sense, but they are also simultaneously always moving and changing and in influx and affected by the conditions around them,” says artist Jess T. Dugan. “And I think of that as how we go through the world, in some ways; we have these core identities and we’re the same people throughout our lives, but simultaneously, we’re constantly changing based on interactions.”

Dugan’s photographs often feature people in water—whether it’s in a bathtub or partially submerged in a river. It’s part of what draws them to Provincetown again and again, a place they first came to as a young adult, where they’ve taught at the Fine Arts Work Center over the years, and where they are the subject of a new exhibition at Stanley, the gallery space of Twenty Summers.

“Provincetown has been really important to my work,” Dugan explains. “It’s a place where I make a lot of photographs. I’m really inspired by the landscape and the people and the sense of safety I feel when I’m there. So, psychologically, it’s been this very meaningful place to make work.” 

But the work in the show also features starkly different images. Some are still lifes, such as the tulips on the cover of the magazine this week, others are not photographs at all, as Dugan works in multiple mediums, including drawings made in the early mornings over a period of years reproducing flowers and plants in various stages of living and dying in and around their home in St. Louis, Missouri.

“That body of work, I began a few years ago as a way to kind of start my days with a more quiet presence. I was finding I was waking up and opening my phone and looking at Instagram and looking at email. And I was just starting each day kind of with this general anxiety, like unnecessarily,” Dugan explains. They began drawing these flowers and plans before their daughter woke up in the morning and soon found that “I was making a serious body of work and that it was about a lot of these existential questions that I’m interested in in my photography, as well. I think a lot about time and how much time we have here, how to make the most of our time alive and in relationship with people. I think a lot about love and how with immense love comes a risk of loss or a fear of loss. And the drawings really were in many ways motivated by my experience as a parent and just, you know, feeling this immense love and responsibility for my daughter and also grappling with the fact that I can’t control my own safety or her safety…It really made me grapple with the fragility of life in a different way.”

Their earliest artistic influences, such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Diane Arbus, and Catherine Opie can be felt in these works, but there is a sense of care that is also central to Dugan’s work, perhaps something coming out of the experience of closeness as well as estrangement in their family and from becoming a parent themself. There is an understanding, a humanity that comes from reckoning with one’s childhood and then becoming the parent to guide someone else’s childhood, and it’s echoed in the title of the show, I’m right here with you, which is also the title of the drawing series. 

Light, water, and identity are essential factors in their work, particularly in photographs such as those in this exhibition that feature people of all genders with their intense gazes fixed on us, daring the viewer to even try to look away. Their eyes lock onto our eyes and it is as though a conversation is happening between us even as we will most likely never actually meet the subjects in real life. The natural environment is not so much a backdrop for these images but part of the subject matter, as well.

“I’ve been increasingly photographing at sunrise or sunset and there’s a beauty to that quality of light, obviously, a kind of warmth and vibrancy. But I think, again, it’s a reference to time and how, you know, there’s this moment that’s incredibly beautiful and, you know, it’s not going to last very long,” says Dugan. “It’s also a reference to the sort of in-between space… it’s neither day nor night… just recognizing that things will change and pass, and naming a desire to make the most of them.”

In addition to the exhibition, Dugan will be in conversation with Provincetown Art Association and Museum director Christine McCarthy about their new two-volume book, Love Pictures: Jess T. Dugan and Charlotte Cotton on Friday, September 11. In that book, Dugan is in conversation with a wide range of people who have been important in their life and for their work, and here again, Provincetown shows up.

Dugan says, “One of the things we talk about in the book is how, you know, as a visibly queer person, visibly gender-non-conforming person, in most places in the world, I’m constantly aware of my own presence and safety. And Provincetown is one of the few places where I just don’t have to have that vigilance at all. So there’s like a personal freedom, a creative freedom in making work there.”

An exhibition of Jess T. Dugan’s work, curated by Sophie Barford and Gavin Kennedy, entitled I’m right here with you, will be on view at Stanley, 494 Commercial St., Provincetown, September 11 – November 29. There will be an opening reception on Friday, September 11, 7 – 9 p.m., preceded by a conversation with Christine McCarthy about their book Love Pictures, 6 – 7 p.m. For more information visit 20summers.org/imrightherewithyou.