Image created by me, Jesse Jacques, April 2025.
Shot on 8x10 film. Structured by necessity and charged with presence. What enters the frame is never just visual.
Last week, I showed you the setup: ice, steel, glass. Fast-moving, high stakes. I was working within limitations, material, technical, and temporal. That’s part of the job. You build the structure. You control what you can.
That moment produced the image above.
The balance is deliberate, formal, visual, and structural. It has to be. That’s the foundation. But that’s just the entry point. What lives inside the form is something else entirely.
Even when a piece of work is built to hold itself together compositionally, structurally, professionally, and even commercially, it still carries more than just that.
The spiritual, the metaphysical, the playful, and the unseen, they come through because that’s what’s in me. It’s not something I try to place. It just shows up in the way I build, in the way I see.
Some of it settles in the spacing. Some in the restraint. Some in the way the light moves through the glass, or how the materials relate without ever touching.
There’s a vertical stacking of ice, steel, and glass. Five cubes. Five distinct forms. I wasn’t thinking in symbols, but I don’t separate form from meaning. The arrangement came through with presence. Frozen and fluid states held together in one frame. And that vertical structure echoes something older. Ritual. Offering. Ascension. The materials sit with weight but not heaviness. Everything was placed to hold, not to bind. The geometry gives it clarity. The energy gives it movement.
Not everything announces itself. I don’t always know what’s made it in. But I always recognize when it’s there.
The structure had to work, composition, exposure, and timing. But when the work is built from contact, symbolism isn’t separate. Even when it’s not deliberate, it’s already present.
That’s how meaning moves through form. Through symbol. Through rhythm. Through the subconscious language we register before we ever put words to it.
When the work is real, it becomes a translator.
It filters through the body. Through intuition and through parts of you that recognize before they analyze.
It becomes a transmission, not of a concept, but of a frequency.
That’s the difference. You can match the surface. You can borrow the materials. But if the work isn’t built from real alignment, that is drawn from contact, not concept, beyond the personal, beyond the purely visual, it doesn’t carry.
When the signal is real, it speaks. And it speaks through more than just the eyes.
I called this Study No. 1, not as a title for the image, but for what this moment represents. The study is the process, the part of me observing, building, and recognizing when something deeper starts to move through the work.
It marked a shift, subtle, but clear.
I’ll go further with the next one.
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