Sketchbook: Jesse Mockrin ’03

At first glance, a painting by Jesse Mockrin ’03 can look familiar. It might call to mind the whimsy of Fragonard’s The Swing or one of Georges de La Tour’s candlelit religious scenes. But upon closer inspection, it becomes apparent that there is actually something quite different about the work. Inspired by historical European art, from baroque to rococo, Mockrin explores issues of gender and feminism, reinterpreting them in her own compositions. 

Mockrin, who is based in Philadelphia, studied visual arts and art history at Barnard and then earned her MFA at the University of California, San Diego. Today, she is exhibited internationally, and you can find her work in the collections of major art museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Dallas Museum of Art. 

Did you focus on painting at Barnard? 

At first, I just took classes in all different departments, but I got really interested in photography and painting while I was there. My senior thesis project ended up being in photography. I also got to take photography at the International Center of Photography through a program that Barnard had. 

How did you make the switch to painting? 

That was in grad school. When I got to San Diego, I had been doing more social documentary photography. For the first time in a while, I had a studio and was excited to paint again. So I started at that time making paintings based on my own photos. And I haven’t stopped since then. I use photography as a tool, and I think my ideas about composition and my sense of framing and cropping come from the language of photography, but now I just produce paintings.

Where do you draw your inspiration from? 

In graduate school, I got very interested in European art history. I had all these reference materials — photocopies and prints from books — and I started directly appropriating from European historical work. I’m always interested in images that already exist in the world and what they tell us about culture and gender.

How do you think your work has evolved over time? 

I started letting myself directly appropriate. I was a fan of these art historical images, and it was kind of like my own version of fan art — this remaking of the thing that you love. It felt like a guilty pleasure at first. This was around 2012, and it was not really in fashion, certainly not in my graduate program. And to appropriate from other art — even though it’s been done forever and certainly had its own movement in the 20th century — still felt to me like something I wasn’t really supposed to be doing. So it has evolved from that to a place to where I feel very comfortable with that language, with the idea that I am building off of the meaning that already exists in those images.

I’ve always been looking at things since Barnard from a feminist and a gender perspective. And so that’s been the through line for me all along. In grad school and just out, I was thinking more about androgyny and trying to break out of a gender binary, and in the last few years, I focused more on the way women are depicted in historical European paintings and the narratives from classical mythology or the Bible that determined those types of depictions and just trying to shed a light on those images. My hope is to extract that crop and reframe it and talk about narratives now from a feminist perspective — about the ways in which women were treated then and how they are still treated now.

How did Barnard play a part in bringing a feminist perspective to your work? 

I remember taking a great class on women in film that was really helpful. We talked about the ideas of the male gaze — that was just very informative language, and the professor had a great feminist perspective on art history. I think being in a community of women was valuable to me and helped me frame culture in terms of gender and gender presentation and think about how malleable those things are and yet how pervasive and difficult they are to shake fundamentally.

Can you take me through your creative process?

I start with images. I go to museums and art libraries. I usually have some idea that I’m starting with, so either a specific myth, story, or artist. Recently, I was looking into witches, for example. I really like going to museums, because then you see so many different things. I take lots of pictures, and then I draw from those photographs. I make small pencil drawings in my sketchbook, and they’re just compositional studies. They’re pretty fast, but I can go back and look at them later, and it helps me really see what I was drawn to in the image and decide which ones are standing out. And then I scale them to think about how big I want the figure to be, and the canvas size I need, and go from there.

Usually each show is a body of work about a specific story or scene. My last little show was about depictions of women with mirrors, so looking at mostly Venus. I will take my little drawings, photocopy them, and put them on the wall so that I can move them around and make sure that together they create a cohesive show.

What’s coming down the pipeline for you?

My first museum solo exhibition is what I am working on. It's going to be this September at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. So it will be a combination of new paintings and loans, and paintings from the museum’s collection. I’m responding, in some cases, directly to works of art they hold. The whole show is loosely themed around issues of gender violence in our history and now.