jessica susan oler: explorations in bark
artist info & virtual world themes
jessica susan oler (she/her) (b. 1986) is a black, queer, femme, artist scholar. oler was born and raised in Davis, California. She holds three associate degrees in Sociology, Liberal Arts and Social Science from Sacramento City College; a Bachelor degree in Sociology from San Francisco State University; and a Masters of Fine Arts from California College of the Arts. She is currently earning her PhD at Queen’s University in the Gender Studies Program under the supervision of Katherine McKittrick.
With black geographic thought as the base for her thinking, oler peels back the layers of the creation, lived experience, and inseparable systemic ideologies of the existence of unprotected black female flesh (inspired by Hortense Spillers) from a disease development perspective. Oler is interested in how questions of health, (narrative) medicine, wellness, and unwellness, which are animated by scientific racism, can be undone and subverted through artistic expression. Her research program seeks to subvert, reshape, and overcome practices of dispossession by centering new aesthetics of black femininity and placemaking that hones in on black joy amid systems that perpetuate the aggression of oppression.
In 2021, she was invited by Harvard School of Medicine to share her narrative of her diagnosis of multiple sclerosis for The Healing Power of Stories: Narrative Theory and Narrative Practice.
Her work has been shown at California College of the Arts, Lewis-Clark State College Center for Arts and History, Chautauqua, Rochester, and Brooklyn, New York; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Miami, Florida; Lawrenceville and Atlanta, Georgia; Alameda, Oakland, and San Francisco, California; and Alexandria, New South Wales, Australia.
The virtual world invites encounters with Oler’s explorations of black geographies, patient narrative/narrative medicine, and the black female body.
go to jessica susan oler's website
contact: jessica.oler@queensu.ca
how to explore the virtual worlds:
Currently, the virtual worlds are most compatible with Chrome and Firefox browsers (the interactive elements may not work with Safari). The worlds are also only compatible with desktop/laptop devices currently.
Navigate the environments using the W, A, S, D keys (to move forward, left, back, and right, respectively). Use the mouse to turn and look around/up and down (like the navigation of a PC game).
Press the escape key to move your mouse outside
of the environment window.
Each virtual world contains audio elements.
To activate the artist audio stories and caption videos, “walk” up to the pink exhibition icons, and the audio/visual content will begin.
You can pause the interactive content by moving away from the area, then return and resume.
participatory prompts
How are the histories of trees and histories of Black lives and bodies intertwined?
How are histories of ableism connected?Why might storytelling be important in relation to medicine?
Disability Justice collective Sins Invalid writes, “how we treat the land is how we treat each other. How we understand who this land belongs to is how we understand who our bodies belong to” (2019, p. 119).
How do Oler’s works relate to this passage? Share your reflections on the exhibition Discord or with peers.
recommended readings & resources
Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (2021)
Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (2006)
Hortense Spillers, Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book (1987)
Laura Jímenez, Kierra Johnson, & Cara Page, “Beyond the Trees: Stories and Strategies of Environmental and Reproductive Justice” in Radical Reproductive Justice (2017)
Moya Bailey & Izetta Autmn Mobley, Work in the Intersections: A Black Feminist Disability Framework (2018)
Sins Invalid, Skin, Tooth, and Bone: The Basis of Movement is Our People - a Disability Justice Primer (2019)
Elizabeth Jekanowski, Norplant, Coercive Policy, and Repoductive Justice (2018)
