Interview with Jane Waggoner Deschner
Artwork memoji mori (plucking_woman on rock by water)
Can you share a little about yourself and your practice?
I'm a photo-based mixed media visual artist based in Montana, US (and becoming more "vintage" myself with every birthday).
Detail from The Anchor Project
The Anchor Project
When/how did you begin working with vintage photographs? What is their significance within your work?
I began working with found photos in 2001. The last semester of my MFA program began that August. A few short weeks into the semester was 9.11. My thesis show, “The Anchor Project,” evolved as my response to that terrible event. It could have been easy to point out the “bad.” But I wanted to find a hopeful way to think and feel (kind of like now…this country/its politics is so all consuming, it’s hard to not feel helpless, over whelmed and distressed). “The Anchor Project” became my semester’s work. For it I mailed (that’s how we did it in those days) several hundred people I knew and asked them to send me a snapshot of something that anchored them. I received over 200 family photos, which I scanned and returned. Their content was nothing consumer culture tells us matters. Instead, kids, families, friends, pets, etc. The project was a joy. I photoshopped the pictures by theme onto eight photos I took of my refrigerator. They were printed as large posters, thumbtacked vulnerably to the gallery walls. I fell in love with the family photo and began collecting ones from my youth in the mid-twentieth century. My archive now numbers ±70,000 faces and lives.
What themes are you exploring within your work?
Empathy, compassion: In 2015 division and acrimony in this country began to surge. I started working on “Remember me. a collective narrative in found words and photographs” in which I embroidered sentences I copied from family/friend-written obituaries into found family photos. My goal was to illustrate that we are more alike than different, and that more connects than separates us. I completed over 1200 pieces and created an immersive museum installation that opened in 2022. Mortality, ephemerality: My current project is “memoji mori. reminders of mortality.” Here I combine the expressive language of emojis with the historical tradition of memento mori. Hand-embroidered skeleton hands, guided by familiar emoji gestures, interrupt reproduced family photos, bringing contemporary expressions of emotion into conversation with reminders of mortality. By adding a new layer of meaning, I intensify emotional signals, invite deeper interpretation—and, ideally, elicit introspection. Humor, grief, memory and mortality coexist.
From the series Remember Me
Do you work with found photographs or family archives? If you work with both, do you have a different relationship to the pieces while creating them?
I make a point of including some of my family photos with anonymous ones. I always try to be respectful of the unknown people whose lost photos I’m using. So it seems fair to use some of my own as well.
Artworks from the series memoji mori. reminders of mortality
Are there any vintage photo artists you admire?
Always inspiring, always soul touching, I never tire of Christian Boltanski. I so admire the work of Yukimi Akiba and have collected two of her pieces. They are beautifully embroidered and her Instagram posts always draw you in by showing both sides and exquisite details. A few others I always love running across in social media include Diane Meyer, Melissa Zexter, Tom Jones and Julie Cockburn.
What is a dream project you would like to bring to life in the next few years?
I’m super excited about publishing a photobook of my “memoji mori. reminders of mortality” project with Atlanta-based Fall Line Press. Books will in hand March 2027! My challenge meantime is securing exhibition venues to accompany the book.
