A lot to be Grateful for Finissage and Artist Talk

Join us for an artist talk with a lot to be grateful for exhibition artist, Jazmine, in conversation with the Arts Education Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Kyli Hawks. They will discuss and give insight to the current work on view, photographic practices, and explore the ideas of gratitude, nostalgia, connection. and isolation that are explored in the exhibition during the exhibition’s Finissage.

About the Exhibition

cam.contemporarie presents, a lot to be grateful for, a solo exhibition of new work by Jazmine. a lot to be grateful for reads as a visual journal on 35mm chronicling cycles and the foundations of everyday life through a series of small intuitive photo constructions sourced from a new accordion book and set of embroidered polaroids with accompanying text.

“You remember when you lost your first long term friend?”

“I kinda remember this day…maybe…sorta.”

Jazmine. pens her innermost thoughts on the white edges of a polaroid. Her approach to photo collage straddles the line of nostalgia, like fading fragments of memory, pieced together in a diagraphic form. As a part of Jazmine.'s journaling practices, the exhibition title, and process comes from the daily meditations of writing what she is grateful for. This intimate snapshot includes images of nature, road trips, self portraits and musings from Chicago, Atlanta, and Arizona documented during the pandemic that are being shown for the first time.

In this series of photos, Jazmine. attempts to create a portrait indirectly — without using the full likeness of friends, family, and loved ones, and instead embellishes the figure with colorful threads, or depicts a celebratory moment through an image of cupcakes with icing, or the shadow of a thought, channelling the photographic portrait practices of black and white photographer, Lee Freilander, or the absence or obscurity of a being felt, but not immediately seen like that of Ana Mendieta. These spliced photographs create an intimate and soft gaze into the everyday life of Jazmine., during a time when the every day stood still, yet was moving in ways that were a constant reminder of gratitude.

About the Artist

Through photography, video, and text, Jazmine deconstructs personal, communal, and political narratives. Memory, both found and fabricated, serves as her primary material; the acts of remembrance inform and shape the processes she employs. As she addresses the beauty and failure of collective memory, Jazmine seeks to mine, archive, and reimagine impressions left on the personal as one navigates the everyday familiar and unknown.

Jazmine holds a BS from Florida A&M University and an MFA from The University of Chicago. She has been recognized as a 2021 Writing Fellow for A Public Space, Fall 2021 Hopper Prize awardee, 2022 grantee for Kartemquin Films, Newcity Breakout artist in 2022 and 2024, OVERRIDE | A Billboard Project artist, DCASE Individual Artists Program grantee. Jazmine also recently has been selected as a 2025 artist resident for Skowhegan School Of Painting & Sculpture.

About the Moderator

Kyli Hawks is a visual storyteller, educator and aspiring curator whose practice remains rooted in the balance between grappling with the complex truths embedded in the chaotic world around us and reimagining more holistically just and joy-filled futures. She uses the camera as a tool of inquiry in this world and hopes to evoke curiosity and penetrate collective cognitive dissonance.

Kyli is currently pursuing a BA in Photography at Columbia College Chicago and is the Jay W. Boersma Arts Education Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Photography where they assist and manage curatorial and educational programing.

Host or Publisher cam.contemporarie