Jay DeFeo was relentlessly experimental. Though known primarily for her monumental painting The Rose (1958–66), her visual and poetic associations play across a remarkable array of media and material, including photography—an under-examined, but critical facet of her process. After the emotional, physical, and creative toll of The Rose, DeFeo famously rested for a period. It was the camera which facilitated her return to artmaking. As the artist herself said, for three years from 1973–1975, “I did nothing but photography.”

Yet photography did not signal a dramatic shift in DeFeo’s practice. Rather it is both reflective of and integral to her painting and drawing process, operating within the artist’s career-long consideration of primal forms and elemental symbols.

DeFeo’s work explores mythological and symbolic links between cosmos, object, and body: the ‘undersoul,’ as her friend beat poet Michael McClure termed it in his poem, Dark Brown (1961). DeFeo used the camera to capture symbolic echoes in texture, line, and shape—as in the veiled resonances between a veined cabbage leaf and an imagined riverbed painted in Detail, Snake River Canyon (1974). Photographed and painted eyes, voids, and windows open to mysterious depths. Such thematic continuities transgress distinctions in subject matter, slipping between figurative and abstract, organic and mechanical. The camera’s material and distancing properties offered DeFeo new tools for focusing and framing, for fixating on texture, and for manipulating tonality, perspective, and scale to enrich and extend her formal cosmologies. More than simply another medium at her disposal, photography allowed DeFeo a new way of seeing, and thus of crafting, her artistic practice.

Undersoul: Jay DeFeo is organized by Lauren Schell Dickens, curator, and Kathryn Wade, curatorial associate.

All artworks in the exhibition by Jay DeFeo.

Unless noted otherwise, all artworks courtesy of The Jay DeFeo Foundation; Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles; Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York; Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris & Dallas.