Zoe Milah DeJesus
‘The Wizard of Loneliness’, Indian ink on Khadi paper, 2022.
Zoe Milah DeJesus is a Puerto Rican-American visual artist originally from Scheyichbi (New Jersey, USA), currently based in Naarm. Zoe also works in performance art, curation and exhibition production. Her work uses simple forms and abstraction, and is centred around self-reflection, spirituality and working with her subconscious. ‘sing me to sleep’ is the title of her latest collection.
”I interviewed Zoe in early January at her studio. Paintings, ink and oil, hung on the walls. Incense was burning and slow music was playing. I felt more creative and serene simply by being in the room. We sat down on the couch and spoke about art, creativity and the process behind her deep, surreal, almost haunting, paintings.Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.” - Sarah Walliss
Can you tell me about when you first started painting?
I started painting after college. I went to Rutgers in New Jersey, and I studied communications and theatre because I didn't really know what I wanted to do. Communications just felt like a sort of default degree. I was always really interested in performing and pushing myself out of my comfort zone, so I took a few theatre classes and that's what I really loved doing. But because I minored in theatre – and there’s not a whole lot you can do with a minor degree – and I had this major in communications, which I didn't like, I graduated and I was really lost because I just didn't know what I was wanting to do. But I knew that I wanted to do something creative. So I guess I was in a bit of a rut and needed an outlet. And so I started drawing in a notebook and then eventually painting with watercolours and stuff. It just became a bit of a crutch. And yeah it just developed organically.
Have you been drawing since you were young?
Yeah, I think, like my mum tells me that I used to hide under tables and draw. And I remember really liking art in school, but I wasn't necessarily somebody who was always carrying a little sketchbook with me. As a kid, I would do creative things. I used to be obsessed with making my own fashion books, like, I don't know, random stuff. I always liked crafts. I liked to dabble in a lot of them, but I never really focused on one. I always liked making things.
Can you tell me a bit about your collection sing me to sleep?
sing me to sleep was kind of a failed experiment in my eyes, but also, there are some silver linings in the failed experiment. I think in winter last year, I was feeling really down and I started isolating myself and I just started making all these pieces. I thought that maybe doing it would give me a sort of sense of purpose or something. I didn't really have the energy to do a solo exhibition, so I thought maybe if I make this collection of artwork it'd be a way to show people what I've been doing and showcase the type of art that I've been experimenting with. I tried that and I liked the process of putting it together, but in terms of selling work … I just didn't sell any of it.
But I guess the good thing that came out of that was that I wasn't as upset about not selling it as I thought I would be. And I think there's pressure to be really relevant online. I think part of the reason why I put together that collection was to not fade away. I think as an artist, you just have a constant battle to stay relevant, keep peoples’ eyes on what you're doing so that you can make money. But it didn't work and then I was like, okay, maybe I just need to take a step back and think about, what am I really trying to do here?
‘La Petit Mort’, oil and acrylic on recycled mat board, 2022.
Do you think you'll keep using black ink for your paintings, or will you move to another medium?
I'm definitely going to keep doing it. I like where it's going. I keep scaling up and when I make them really big, I love them. I think I'd like to keep trying to make them bigger and bigger.
What sort of difference do you think there is between the oil paintings and the black ink in terms of emotion?
There's something deeper or darker about the oil paintings because they're textured. I think they draw people in in a different way. You can do a lot with colour that you can't do with just black and white. I feel like the black and white ones are … they feel like you can get lost in them and they feel almost like a maze. They also feel more like a call to action or something, like they're yelling at you.
And then the paintings, they have a softness, but also a deepness, more of that haunting kind of quality. But it depends on the painting. I think I tend to lean towards using darker colours with the oils. I want them to feel a bit dark.
With your ink paintings, because you don't have the colours to express emotion, do you find that you focus more on the shapes?
It's those ones that are pretty painstaking but a good challenge because it kind of forces me to come up with new shapes and new characters. And then I have to think about what kind of story I'm trying to tell with the characters, which has been really fun actually, because now I have in my notebook two or three pages of all of my characters that I've created.
And I started assigning them meanings. So there are symbols for different things. I think my goal is to get to a point where I can like, communicate a message or a story just by using my symbols and my language.
‘Momento mori’, oil and acrylic on recycled mat board, 2022.
So do the characters you create have their own stories or is it more like an emotion?
They don’t have their own lives or anything. That would be crazy. No, they’re almost like native symbols. This is what they’re kind of loosely inspired by. In Puerto Rico, the native people are called the Taíno – they were the tribe that was there when Columbus arrived and the population that was colonised – and they have all these symbols that they would use for different things, like a symbol for water or air or food. Anyway, I wanted to do something similar and have symbols for things like trees, clouds, and then I also have things like black holes. I don't know if I’ve fully figured out why I've even made those characters. I feel like I'm figuring it out as I keep making them, if that makes sense. I'm still trying to figure out what exactly I'm trying to say with all of them. That's why I get really curious to know what other people think when they look at it because I almost feel like they might know more than me.
In the video in which you describe sing me to sleep, you talk about using your subconscious to paint. Do you paint from your subconscious in all of your works or was this particular to this collection?
I think that's where my art comes from. I'm not a technically skilled artist in the sense that if you ask me to draw something from life, I couldn't do it. I mean I'm not a realist painter. The place that my art comes from is just a very, genuine, internal, quite emotional place and I feel like that's really all I've got. Everything that I make is just coming from either things that I've been mulling over in my head or meditating on and writing about and then they finally manifest into an image somehow or it's an instantaneous thing where I'm just in the studio or writing in my journal and I just I try to shut my brain off and put the pen on the paper and see what comes out.
‘The only way out is through’, oil on linen, 2021.
What’s your process, if you have one, of accessing your subconscious?
I don't know if I have a thing that I do to access it. I think making art is how I access it. I mean, I think Basquiat is like one of the first painters that I saw that inspired me to make visual art and he did use free association a lot in his paintings. I think a lot of his paintings are a lot more considered than maybe people think, but there's definitely an element of free association where he's just writing words that come into his head. I’ve watched him in interviews and the interviewers were asking him, ‘What did you mean by that?’ Like they're trying to apply this greater meaning to something that he wrote and he's just like, ‘I wrote it because I like it’. I love that answer. I think a lot of the time I don't know how intellectual art really is. At the end of the day, it can be, if you're intentionally adding these layers to it. But a lot of the time when I make something I'm not really thinking about why I'm making it. So when someone asks me why. I'm just like, I don't know. I think there's kind of an unnecessary expectation for art to be intellectual. For it to be this thing that is academic and elite and all of it. It's just not. At least mine's not.
I think a lot of people might be afraid that they don't understand art.
I really wish people didn't feel that you need some sort of special training to be able to enjoy art. Like you really just don't. But I think it has to do with money. If you're only showing your work in galleries where people have to pay thousands of dollars for a painting, then you are inherently cutting yourself off from a whole lot of people. I think that's like the biggest struggle that a lot of artists must face, or at least for me. I don't want to be the kind of artist that is exclusively showing their work in galleries where no one can afford it. But then if you don't do that, you can't rely on art for money. And I think I'm kind of realising that maybe I don't want to rely on art for money if that's the trade off.
You made a short film called Sad World!. Can you tell me more about it and have you made anything else in terms of film or production?
I made that film for a solo show that I did in December 2021. I think I wanted to utilise what I learned when I studied theatre and performance. So I had that idea and I thought I would run with it. It's really weird.
Weird is good.
I was quite happy with it. I think at the end of the day, if I do make short films or theatre or performance type things again, they'll always be weird. I do have plans to try it again, but that's one of the things that I get in my head about a lot. Performance is a bit of a muscle. That's one of the main things I learned when I studied it. If you're not constantly doing it, you just become a bit stiff and it's not something that you can, at least for me, just get up and do without feeling uncomfortable.
Are there other forms of art that you’re interested in? Anything else you’d like to do?
Aside from theatre and performance, I really want to get into sculpture. I’ve been playing around bringing elements of my paintings to life in a more three-dimensional way. I also like the idea of stepping away from painting and doing something that I'm a bit more naive in because it just takes the pressure off. I think I've been painting for so long now that I have this expectation that I put on myself to be perfect. But with everything else, I don't really feel that pressure.
‘SAD WORLD!’, 2021. Available on youtube.
‘You’re getting very sleepy’, Indian ink on Khadi paper, 2022.
‘Pain is worse than pleasure is good’, Indian ink on recycled mat board, 2022.