Memory. Fragments of time triggered by our senses pierce the present, connecting pieces of now to what has been lost or broken. Veronica De Jesus’s suites of drawings and inventories of hand-carved instruments, masks, and paper cut-outs are an homage to her history. She is memory’s pickpocket. Snatching quotidian materials such as scraps of cardboard, palm fronds, dryer lint, tape, and bits of tin from the devotional stream of life De Jesus fabricates objects and works on paper both endearingly humble and extraordinary.

Raised by her Puerto Rican father with indigenous Taino roots, De Jesus lived her American-born childhood on the road and on the run, crossing states and changing names, shedding the past to grab on to the future.

Stories, songs, and games that her father devised were creations of familial identity and survival -- bespoke tools to obliterate the effects of loss. De Jesus’s works gesture to these traditions and perform like diaries or life logs. Using a repertoire of kitchen-sink methods, the embodied “entries” recall her transient childhood, forming a narrative of empathy for activity, performance, necessity, and materials at hand. De Jesus finds meaning in ordinary things, testing, and retesting the interactions and significance of the stuff that surrounds her. Her harvests are asset driven. Vaporizing hierarchies, everything holds a story, a reason, a memory. Amassing and offering a variety and mosaic of forms such as pop culture icons, heroes, tools, candy bars, and hard currency made of clay De Jesus touchingly examines American life, the long loneliness of hidden identities, and ways to be present, ways to let go.

De Jesus’s work is an ever-evolving theater staging everyday actions that magnify the instability of life, its triumphs and perils, its links and losses. De Jesus is the impresario and stylist, constructing a rep company of characters based on friends, family, pop heroes or invented personas in search of a plot. “Create connections, if possible between everything in the world,” Kurt Schwitters said. With wit, sincere intent, and true grace, Veronica De Jesus engages all her senses to do just that.

(Theaters of Memory, text by Julia Couzens)

Veronica De Jesus is a visual artist raised in several American cities. She illustrates life as an American, in all its varied splendor. Drawing on pop culture icons, sports, heroes and villains, and more, she draws our complex world into focus. Her Memorial Drawings, an ongoing series of illustrations complemented with text, honor the many people who have influenced our collective culture and reflect on loss and mourning. Her work also explores identity and the ways we hide and reveal elements of our personalities. Her work has been shown in galleries in San Francisco, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Atlanta. She has a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from UC Berkeley.