One person's trash is artist's treasure

"I don't let my dad throw anything away," says Jessica Inocencio '05 to explain how she amasses the material used in her artistic joinings of objects, painting, poetry and sculpture. "I collect things," she goes on to explain. "If I find something on the floor, I will just pick it up."

Inocencio fuses many different artistic mediums into one. Based loosely in traditional artistic disciplines, her work is made more dynamic by the incorporation of found objects — items which would have gone into the garbage had she not rescued them.

This explains the presence of old batteries, paint-splattered light blubs, metal chain links and the internal pieces of music boxes in her work. Inocencio's selection of objects is varied, as is her use of them.

She might do a painting, then attach three-dimensional objects to the canvas. She may take the door off a dresser and make a collage inside with old photographs and scraps of poetry she's written. Or she'll make a plaster mold of her hands and incorporate it into a sculpture. "I have my body parts laying around my room just in case I want to use them for something," she jokes about her newly-discovered interest in the use of a papier-mache-type material.

Her fascination with layering forms of art was the result of an assignment in a photography class at her high school in a rural town outside San Antonio. The teacher asked students to create a collage of their photographs, but Inocencio felt that just putting the pictures together was too flat.

In her search to add depth to her project, she ended up painting on top of the collage. Extremely pleased with the result, she decided to toy with combinations in other art mediums. "Once it's finished, it looks really intact," she says about the multi-dimensional look she works to achieve. "You can't separate the elements."

In addition to her high school art classes, Inocencio has enrolled in classes in Princeton's Visual Arts Program. But she feels she has grown more in her independent work than she ever could within the confines of a classroom.

"The intensity of my art isn't in classes. It's in my bedroom," she says about where she does her best work. "I've always been a closet artist. I keep it all in my room."

Inocencio believes it is important to study the formal disciplines of art, but values experimentation on her own turf. "You can only teach art so much," she says. "Eventually, you have to do it on your own. It's got to be a personal experience, a discovery."

That discovery can take either a day or three weeks, depending on whether Inocencio is having what she calls either a "creative spasm" or a "brain freeze." But she very rarely works on extended projects.

"Art is expression and expression is impulsive," she says to explain her self-determined deadlines. "The whole 'thinking' thing can get in the way."

Others have in fact pushed her to be more practical in her art. "Just draw what is on the page," art teachers have urged her out of exasperation. But she is not content doing just a still life. Her sculptures are imbued with meaning that she feels can't be communicated merely by capturing a bowl of fruit on the canvas.

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She points to one of her pieces as an example of what she tries to do with her art. It is an abstract, textural painting with an old black-and-white photograph of her grandmother pasted on the canvas. According to Ino-cencio, art is "about how you incorporate meaningful things into your life. People put pictures in picture frames. I just wanted a grander one."