Jaiden Haley

Reality Feels the Same No Matter Where You Live

My initial spark of inspiration for this series of multimedia paintings came from a collection of a few thousand photos I found on an old memory card that dated from about 2000-2005, when I was a very small child. Some of these photographs were scanned from film and others were early digital images. Many of the places and people in these photographs were very familiar to me and gave me quite a sense of nostalgia and allowed me to reminisce quite happily on the past. I decided I wanted to immortalize these memories and feelings in paintings that focused on small events I remembered from my childhood that have stuck with me as fairly vivid memories as I’ve gotten older. Each of these paintings also contains a clown character who acts as a placeholder to embody actions or events of the memories. When I first created this character, I was incredibly reluctant to assign a name or a gender because I want the clown to be as open as possible to outside interpretation. I want the character to be a blank slate for people to input their own personalization and meaning. I landed on the clown’s design after watching a short, animated clip from an old Betty Boop cartoon where the animators had rotoscoped a ghostly clown to Cab Calloway’s own dance moves while performing his song “St. James Infirmary Blues.”

A key feature of this series of works is my combination of two-dimensional and three-dimensional forms. My sculptural elements give these paintings an extra layer for both confusion and depth of meaning. I started small, with a bit of embroidery (the ladybugs in Sticky Ladybug Analysis) and worked my way up the ladder of assemblage complexity through wire structures and picture frames until my latest piece where I’ve made a completely three-dimensional replica of my clown figure that sits on a shelf

A House Remembered, More or Less, Correctly

Acrylic paint, paper mache, cardboard, wire, polymer clay, and fabric

2021

A House Remembered, More or Less, Correctly(Detail)

Acrylic paint, paper mache, cardboard, wire, polymer clay, and fabric

2021 attached to the canvas. I believe that the three-dimensional replication of physical objects as well as the addition of more subtle sculptural forms enhances the tactile representation of these memories. A few of the artworks in this series utilize battery powered string lights that have been woven through the canvas. I used these lights to create an intimate and cozy sensation that presents the canvases to the viewer as small windows into a separate reality - small windows into the idea of memory. Many of the works in this series represent very specific memories I’ve held for quite a while and considering the intense unreliability of most childhood memories, creating these works has given me a wonderful opportunity to reflect on the accuracy with which I remember my own childhood.