Jess T. Dugan, “Self-portrait (blue room),” 2021, Inkjet Print, 40 x 30 inches, Courtesy of the artist
Nov. 5, 2022 – May 7, 2023
Artist talk and reception: March 30, 2023
In Look at me like you love me, Jess T. Dugan reflects on desire, intimacy, companionship, and the ways our identities are shaped by these experiences. In this highly personal body of work, Dugan brings together self-portraits, portraits of individuals and couples, and still lifes, reflecting on relationships, solitude, family, loss, healing, and the transformations that define a life. Dugan has long used photography to understand their own identity and to connect with others on a deeper level. Their process of working slowly and collaboratively discloses moments of heightened psychological intensity in images that transcend the specifics of a particular person or place, engaging with what it means to know oneself alongside and through others. Using medium-format cameras and natural lighting, Dugan employs traditional photographic practices to depict these contemporary subjects, resulting in images that both evoke and reimagine the conventional dynamics of art-historical portraiture. Brought together here, these photographs function as an extended, oblique self-portrait as much as a catalogue of friends and loved ones.
Jess T. Dugan is an artist whose work explores issues of identity through photography, video, and writing. Their work has been widely exhibited and is in the permanent collections of over 45 museums throughout the United States. Their monographs include Look at me like you love me (MACK, 2022), To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults (Kehrer Verlag, 2018) and Every Breath We Drew (Daylight Books, 2015). They are the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, an ICP Infinity Award, and were selected by the Obama White House as an LGBT Artist Champion of Change.
Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Friday, Saturday; 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday; noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. Closed Monday. For more information, 913.469.3000 or www.nermanmuseum.org.
