In the Backspace /

Expert of Denial by Jasmine Fetterman

April 06 - 29, 2023
Opening Reception / Thursday, April 06, 5–8pm

Expert of Denial is Soil member Jasmine Fetterman’s first solo exhibition in the backspace gallery. She writes of the work:

I have reached a place within my life and my artist practice that everything has shifted. My work has always existed for me as a tool or a framework to analyze, breakdown, and build upon my understanding of what/how it means to exist. Up until I started mainlining hormones my work was my obsession and my way to express and explore myself in ways that I couldn’t actualize in the presentation of myself. As I have grown to accept and cherish who I am, I am finding that my work no longer needs to express the things that it did before.

I am attempting to go back to the roots of my obsession with art-making and find that joy and fulfillment that I once had. I hope that for any onlooker the same happens, but with themselves inserted within the framework that the artwork does or does not present. While also creating space for and normalizing queer, trans, and femme bodies/identities in art. I hope that there are many access points within the work that different people are able to relate to on some personal level. It exists to create community and demonstrate strength while also being didactic at the same time.

Artist statement /

Jasmine Fetterman uses a multi-disciplinary and research based approach to explore the complex and fluid nature of identity as a universal concept throughout humanity. As a Central European, first generation American, they reference themes of western histories, mythologies, and aesthetics to explore politics of the queer body and its relationship to constructed space. Their desire is to create space to include and normalize queer bodies within film, media, and the art world. Focusing on the necessity of a utopic liminal/transformational space that they have labeled as queer architecture, to also question/critique the role of socio-economic class, gender structures, and hierarchies. They have shown around the West Coast, Pacific Northwest and the Southwest, most recently at the Henry Museum in 2021. They hold an MFA from the 3D4M program at the University of Washington completed in 2021.  

BIO /

I am a transgender artist that grew up on the peninsula of Washington. There is a subtle yet undeniable elegance that exists within this landscape that helped shape my understanding of beauty and the world. When I started making art I was continuing a search for something that I had been looking for my whole life. Over the years my work has existed as a place and a framework for me to explore identity and sexuality. The understanding of what this body of work represents has shifted and altered over the years as a fluid, ephemeral thing, changing as my understanding of my identity has grown stronger. I love my family dearly and I have so much gratitude for the way they raised me, but being gay not to mention transgender was something that was not acceptable and was kept hidden from them and myself a lot of my life. As the practice has progressed, more of the secrets that I had held close or didn’t even know I had, were being exposed and released into the world. Culminating at this point within my practice and the end of graduate school as a pretty ridiculous coming out story. I have been reunited with an old self as I begin this second life as Jasmine, or Jazzy as I like to be called.