Through A Digital Fence
Jolene Lower’s collaboration with Cristina Szyszko and Amy Wolf titled shoegazers versus mouth breathers; shirts vs skins (2025) is an amalgamation of the chaos and loathing of modern day media. It’s a hypnotic, neon-patterned installation paired with a video monitor where, if you listen closely, you can hear the confessions of the 4 AM thoughts that creep into your consciousness after scrolling mindlessly at your screen for too long.
Growing up during the turn of the millennium in New York City, Jolene’s oeuvre revels in the rawness of life. The shift from media being a homogeneous source of information and entertainment to individualized algorithms has birthed today’s experience.
Izzy Pav: You are currently a first year grad student in the School of Arts and Art History sculpture program at University of South Florida. How does the art student community there inspire and motivate you in your current work?
Jolene Lower: I got the idea for The Box by working with Cristina Szyszko and Amy Wolf. I really admire Amy's ceramics and video work in ASMR and Cristina’s recent work with patterns and wallpaper installations. They are my NBA draft picks when I’m sensory maximalism-ing. Together, we talked a lot about the influencers who cook in their roach-infested beds for ASMR, and other ways that people online decorate their bedrotting habits.
IP: Your work incorporates monitors, video, and acting. How do you view modern day media?
JL: My work is the product of being socialized by trash TV in the early 2000s, but also exists in a time where the Internet has replaced cable. Now we are shown only what we want to see by our own individualized algorithm, rather than TV networks or cable companies. I don't want to be individually pandered to, I want to be shown the same channels and commercials as everyone else.
I am interested in television from an anthropological perspective, because it consolidates what Americans want to see: the lowest common denominator. I’m not at all interested in making value judgements about TV. My only goal is to reflect the world the way I experience it.
IP: Leandro Elrich’s Elevator Pitch (2011) is similar in which people don’t enter the elevator but instead it is a full length mirror projection. What experiences inspired you to create your own box and how to use the monitor?
JL: The TV is an object that exists in peoples homes and lives and memories. The Box is more about the screen itself rather than what I plug into the media player. My friend Bobby told me a story once about sitting in the backseat of his mom’s car driving down the highway. And another car starts driving next to them with a bunch of TVs playing hardcore porn and facing out the windows at them. He said his mom was horrified at the porn part, but he was in awe just thinking ‘How is he able to play all those TVs in a car?!’
Have you ever watched TV through other people’s windows? You can talk to the person next to you and be like, “They’re watching SVU; the one episode where this happens…” And now we’re entertained by that discourse rather than its content, which is shitty writing, acting, and copaganda.
IP: Would you prefer people to be able to stand inside The Box? Or have more monitors?
JL: Well…no. Because I like the glass. Just for the glass alone. I like the idea of looking through a window, through a digital fence, through a monitor screen. And how the pattern looks like a lattice, like you're looking through the gaps in a fence, like an illusion of voyeurism.
It’s not about the amount of monitors. It’s the presence of being where they shouldn’t be.
Projections are so much less dazzling. Monitors have a certain pull to them; everything is coming from that source. You can watch it like a TV, but not a projected image.
The television as an object itself is important to my practice. It commands the arrangement of all other objects and people within a space. Most Americans have a nostalgic relationship with the TV; touching its static surface, yelling at the screen, and trying to take a shit in the time it takes for the Proactiv and Danimals commercials to be over. My work exploits the personal relationship people have to the experience of watching a monitor and yet engaging with the collective programming.
IP: In your work, the design, costuming, and makeup are grimy and erotic. It begs the question of makeup and outfit design, and what they reflect.
JL: I loved Old Gregg as a kid. My mom had The Mighty Boosh box set. I also loved queer coded cartoon villains like Ursula from The Little Mermaid or Him from Powerpuff Girls before I knew what queer meant. All these characters are obscene caricatures written by adults projecting their phobias on us as children, but in reality a lot of us were either obsessed with or at least sexually confused by these characters. The first time I ever heard of a transness was on The Jerry Springer Show and on The Mighty Boosh, which is so bad and hard to watch as an adult. But also, where else are you supposed to learn those things as a kid except staying up late to watch trash TV?
IP: What inspired you while writing the script? Everything is so maximalist, and yet your script is a whirlwind of depression, self-deprecation meets ego and narcissism, unseriousness, and even religion. These tones and subjects conflict in interesting ways.
JL: I was writing the script as fast as possible; somewhere between rant and stream of consciousness, which is what I try to get out of people when I am interviewing them. Much of the visuals are about the non-sexual eroticism of ASMR, and the audio depicts depressive and intrusive thoughts as sensations. Most of it wasn't supposed to be personal at all because I wasn’t raised in a Catholic oppressive household. Any religious guilt I feel is self-inflicted, but also because I was socialized in this country. I stole that line, “Man is the head of woman,” from Cristina.
The only personal parts are probably the most unserious.
You could be having the worst day of your life, and then slip on a banana peel. Now what?
You get really depressed and feel like you’re in The Truman Show, feel like everyone’s watching you, but, of course, why would everyone be watching me, because who am I? I’m nothing compared to the universe. So, while I’m not fighting the narcissist allegations, I would describe it as more of a persecution complex type.
IP: Throughout the work you leave nuggets of your personal life, and that establishes points of empathy and identity. And yet, the script can be so crude that it almost stops the viewer from making a connection with the character on the screen—similar to how a Ralph Bakshi is so raw by drawing the viewer in with cartoons and then casting them out with twisted reality. What does juxtaposing these aspects do for you, and how do your interviews play into your work?
JL: You clocked me I guess. It is a default self-consciousness where anything genuine has to be hidden under layers of ‘crudeness’ and contradictions and old-man rants. Bakshi does rotoscope, and he gets a lot of the audio by getting drunk and recording people and strangers. And then he goes home and adds a story and animation around it, like a little creep. I use similar concepts, but I mostly do interviews then manipulate what they say while I’m alone.
IP: Your title uses identity keywords that draw in curious viewers who relate to the words or are interested in what they mean. And, of course, everyone loves to see a fight.
JL: The title refers to two kinds of artists: those who think about thinking to the point of redundancy, and those who think about impulsivity to the point of shallow hypocrisy. It's like the difference between people who enjoy things and people who enjoy things ironically: not very different at all in the grand scheme of things.
Both types of people are in the crowd cheering for Jerry, while guests beat the shit out of each other. And Jerry's standing far away from the fight, with a microphone, not really doing anything, and they’re cheering his name “Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!”
That’s their Colosseum, the Jerry Springer set.
I get that art is supposed to engage, and entertainment is supposed to distract, but all of the artists that I admire create works that I see as the highest form of entertainment. I never even imagined making video art until I saw Ryan Trecartin, for example, the distraction as an art in and of itself.
I feel like a lot of video art does too much introspection for the viewer. Like, yes, reality TV is smooth-brained derogatory trash, but also every season of Bad Girls Club taught me more about group power dynamics and hierarchy than that book Lord of the Flies ever did.
Written by Izzy Pav
Photography by Mina Dulce