When you are a mother you are expected to be selfless, and any utterance of a challenge or obstacle will be seen as a complaint. Motherhood is a profession with no breaks or guidance, and the time and effort you put forth goes relatively unnoticed. In 2015, through good fortune, I became a mother. I was not shocked by the meaningfulness of the experience, but at the unrealized burdens of motherhood that no one talks about. The loss of my former identity was displacing. Every single thing about my life had changed all at once and my lack of sleep is now 14 months past what I had anticipated. I grieve my former self, not because I am ungrateful but because it is hard to adjust to being a mother.
The fact is, motherhood is an ideal that cannot be accomplished. It is a hard reality, rewarding as it is, that is covered up by ideals of perfection and bliss. The ideal mother doesn’t even look like a mother and she is put together, collected, and composed. There seems to be no forgiveness. I began taking photographs of myself in 2015 as a feminine mother ideal who I wished I could be; a goddess who was hard and unbreakable. In my real life I constantly felt like I was making excuses for not doing a better job at everything. As time went on, I began to feel more confident in my role and I began offsetting these unattainable ideals with photographs depicting the reality of motherhood through visual metaphor.
Jennifer Georgescu’s work describes instinctual aspects of humanity correlating to and differing from societal structuring. With a background in painting and photographic arts, she utilizes medium format film photography, installation, and digital technology. Her projects analyze dualisms in language, relationships, mythologies and control. “I often search for the balance that exists in between these dichotomies. This is how I view humanity; always teetering on the line between fiction and reality, domination and submissiveness, self and other.” After obtaining a BFA from Watkins College of Art and Design in 2008, Georgescu was awarded a year long residency at Vanderbilt University’s “Gallery F.” She has received numerous awards from Artist Portfolio Magazine, the Camera Obscura Journal of Literature and Photography and the Julia Margaret Cameron Award. Her works have recently been exhibited in the Masur Museum of Art, the Detroit Museum of New Art, and PhotoCenter NW.
Website: jengeorgescu.com
