Rhonda Arose, 2023

 

Artist Statement:

Rhonda, nestled in a floral landscape, blends captured footage with hand-drawn colored pencil atop a 3D animation enhanced by AI technology. Through this piece, I aim to transcend the notion of robotic AI artistry by employing AI as a collaborative tool with traditional hand-drawn artwork.

BIO:

Jermaine "jET" Carter, hailing from southeast Washington, D.C., embarked on his artistic journey at the age of 6, drawing inspiration from cartoons of the 90s and early 2000s. His creativity sparked while tracing TV screen projections to capture what he saw through the screens.

A 2016 graduate of Duke Ellington School of the Arts, Jermaine embraced a typo, "Jetmaine," from a friend's text, giving birth to his art persona "jET." His pursuit of artistic growth guided him to The Cooper Union, where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts. This education granted him an interdisciplinary perspective, liberating him from creative constraints. By melding animation, motion graphics, sculpture, and digital fabrication, jET crafted the expansive "jETCO" visual universe. “jETCO,” is an imagined, alternate universe inhabited by caricatures, metaphors, and allegories that is a direct reflection of jET’s perception of the society infused with his artistic practice. Through nonlinear storytelling and narrative collage, he maps out the jETCO world, a dramatized amalgamation of everyday absurdities and horror—those that exist particularly within the precarious social and political space Black Americans occupy.

Much of jET’s recent work involves creating vignettes through drawing and painting, illustrating various narratives about power, peace, struggle, and absurdities of daily life, juxtaposed with the cartoon influences he grew up watching. He feels comfortable using cartoons in his works to disarm the viewer at first glance.

jET inserts himself into the world as a character named jETTi who serves as hisavatar, wanting nothing more than to paint pictures and document the world around him. Other characters that reside within jETCO include JAMAL: a black police officer and very tragic character who is losing hold of his humanity within the commodity of other JAMAL’s. Then there is Rhonda, a little black girl and carrier of light that illuminates an otherwise dreary world plagued by late capitalism.

To solidify these creations, jETCO often handcrafts paper using diverse materials like bills, receipts, baseball cards, recycled drawings, and even Pokémon cards. Blending these materials with watercolor paper, sifting through a screen and allowing the paper to dry, forms a definitive foundation that adds texture and context to the narratives. This process yields a tangible, textured base for the world of jETCO, enhancing the illustrated stories and giving them more context. Once a narrative comes to mind, the jETCO paper is treated with passes of colored pencil and sometimes watercolor. In his belief, these additions to the drawing's foundations provide crucial support to the narratives he portrays.