I Want You To Know My Story at The Ringling Museum
Jess T. Dugan’s I Want You To Know My Story at The Ringling Museum is an exhibition of portraits where the subjects look at us. It consists of several color photographs and two videos that represent the spectrum of gender and sexuality with realism. It’s an exhibition of love and being seen.
The exhibition is held in the Keith D. Monda Gallery located in the southwest corner of the museum near The Center for Asian Art. It’s a large gallery that has a different feeling from some the rest of The Ringling in that it feels much more contemporary and more like a Chelsea gallery with tall, graphite-gray-painted walls, an open floorplan, and a seating area with two blue valour couches. It’s a comfortable place with an atmosphere of quiet contemplation.
Dugan’s photographs are uniformly framed in white boxes and hang at various heights with some staggered on top of each other. Some are so big they envelop your entire periphery and others are so small they could hang in your living room. The portraits depict the artist’s family and social circles, including loved ones and couples, and the still lifes are flowers and domestic scenes with dramatic lighting. They all have compositions and clichés that recall the Baroque masters, which begs questions of representation in the Western canon of art history.
I Want You To Know My Story feels like going to a friend’s house where portraits of their family and snapshots of precious moments surround you and embrace you like a hug. It’s a welcoming feeling. Dugan’s portraits accomplish this with soft, natural light, vulnerable posing, direct eye-contact, and simple color palettes. The still lifes are a bit more melancholic with themes of nature-morte, and lighting that accentuates harsh shadows.
Collin (Red Room) (2020) is a portrait with partial red drapery set in a room with red walls and red curtains. The subject looks directly at us, wearing only a silver chain that hangs almost as low as the towel around his waist. Collin’s relaxed expression is without judgement or allure; instead, a quiet confidence. The portrait's intimacy is similar to a moment with a loved one when you’re getting ready together, or right before bed.
Two sixteen-minute videos cycle through family photos set to an audio track of the artist reading letters to their family. The videos let us hear the artist’s voice. They’re personal, and show snapshots from their life.
Letter To My Father (2017) shows the artist as a child and tells the story of their relationship with their father. It shows their parents getting divorced and then both marrying women. It shows them wearing a dress to their father’s wedding and a button-down shirt to their mother’s. The voiceover tells of not being supported in their queerness, of having chest surgery at eighteen and not telling their father about it, of being the only family member to show up at their father’s retirement from the military. The video ends by saying the two of them haven’t spoken in two years, and that the letter will never be sent.
Letter To My Daughter (2023) is a slideshow of the artist’s life since the first video. It shows them confronting parenthood, being called ‘Perry’ (short for parent) by their daughter Elinor, meeting and marrying their wife Vanessa in 2015, dealing with a miscarriage, and mistreatment in the hospital. Dugan and their wife were subjected to homophobic treatment during the night Elinor was born. It’s a real-world moment that starkly contrasts the love and preciousness conveyed by the snapshots cycling by during the voiceover. It’s hard to imagine anyone being treated so disrespectfully during such a vulnerable time. The video ends with a photo of Elinor ankle deep in beach surf facing outward toward the horizon.
At one point in Letter To My Daughter, Dugan describes feeling like they were underwater after dealing with a miscarriage with their wife. They say it felt like being behind glass. This experience contextualizes some of the still lifes included in the exhibition, particularly Window At Sunrise (2021) which has a melancholic tone. The image peers through the panes of late-afternoon glass as condensation drips through a whiskey-colored exterior that’s blurred to abstraction. It resembles the work of Uta Barth in that its subject is somewhere other than where the lens is focused; in the ether.
With such care and respect for gender fluidity, Dugan’s work is similar in effect as Collier Schorr’s oeuvre. Dugan’s double portraits showing young love are in the vein of Schorr’s South of No North (1995), and Dugan’s reverential, hero-like approach to depicting people who are transitioning recalls Schorr’s Untitled (Casil) (2015-18). Both artists have used military garb in the genre of portraiture to represent masculinity and how it's defined, and both have an artistic approach that champions realism.
Dugan’s intimate approach feels like we’re witnessing moments from a personal narrative, much like the work of Elinor Carucci, where they and their family are the primary subjects. The photographs are portraits of moments that are sometimes so painful that all you can do is remove yourself from it by photographing it. Intermixed are moments of stress and exhaustion, but also pride and joy.
The artist will be in conversation with curator Christopher Jones on February 7th, 2025 at 11 AM at The Ringling Museum.
