About the Artist
Jacob Rogers-Fett is an illustrator and comics artist from Santa Monica, California.
Silica, 2021
Pluto, 2022
Heaven, 2022
About the Work
Vacation Photos is a triptych of colored pencil illustrations depicting a family trip to Florida as seen through the perspective of the family’s young son.
The drawings observe the practice of American domestic tourism & recreation, reproducing the eye of the average camera-toting father and revealing the nuclear family as an instrument of social control. An inchoate knowledge of this lingers in the corner of the son’s awareness, twisting the expectation of childish fun and familial comfort which are associated with All-American summertime voyages into colorful nightmare distortions.
The nuclear family is the tightest unit in American culture, the proverbial social paradise. Its ideal role is as a close-knit tribe, a pocket where honesty, openness, and love survive untouched by the ills of society. In reality, it is often within the family that the state of neoliberal atomization is at its most dire.
Vacation pictures are from the future and the past. They promise an escape to an alternate present with the hope history will forget our ugliness as the edges of experience soften into sugary nostalgia. The version of experience we will return to will be carefully controlled, everything it was supposed to be. These drawings aim to dethrone this ideal.