Veronica de Jesus, Novas, 2010, watercolor and white gel pen on colored paper, 19 x 25 inches. Photo courtesy Get This! Gallery.

Home is an amorphous concept for artist, Veronica De Jesus whose first solo exhibition Emanate Car Show is currently on display at Get This! Gallery. The first part of De Jesus’ life was spent traveling around the country in cars, always unsettled and uncertain. De Jesus explores her nomadic childhood through whimsically abstracted line drawings that expose memories from her life and the cars that symbolize those moments.

De Jesus’s minimal white lines that compose her drawings give lightness to, at times, traumatic memories. The quality of her lines is confident and intentional, yet there is still an almost improvisational and free-form aspect to the cars in their abstraction. In this way, it becomes clear to the viewer, that while specific elements of De Jesus’ memories are more concrete, her means to remembering and rendering these memories concrete is a less certain practice. The cars she has depicted, in this way, could almost be perceived as mnemonic devices – each line and curve indicating a particular memory. By recreating the imagery of her childhood, she is in turn reinforcing her memory, perhaps from a new and altered perspective. Like any mnemonic device, each time a memory is recalled, it becomes newly significant and salient to that specific point in time. She writes in her statement, “Perspectives from that time often act as a filter through which I can apprehend more recent interests and observations.”

Veronica de Jesus, YUF, 2010, spray paint and white gel pen on colored paper, 23 x 36 inches. Photo courtesy Get This! Gallery.

Abstraction is an important aspect to De Jesus’ works. The use of similarly weighted white lines throughout each of the compositions allows her to scale the accuracy of her depictions based on the density of her lines. A work such as Novas illustrates several parked cars, but the image is not immediately apparent as lightning bolts, feather-like hatch marks, and drafting lines are superimposed atop the image. Elements from the cars’ dashboards float around the composition as well, giving the effect of an image that could be either the interior of a car or a parking lot of multiple cars. In this way, the image becomes a more fully realized depiction of a car because it is not specifically defining any one part of it.

Like many memories, it is the small details of her recollections that provide the basis for many of these works. YUF illustrates the first car De Jesus owned as an adult; its license plate displayed the letters YUF. The image shows the spray painted outline of the body of an unidentifiable car model with the letters YUF floating around the composition. De Jesus isn’t interested in giving the viewer a fully realized image of the vehicle. Her competent technique in her drawings shows the viewer that the blurred details and inexact rendering is meditated to allow both the artist and viewer to fill in the specifics.

Veronica de Jesus, El Camino, 2010, spray paint and white gel pen on colored paper, 19 x 25 inches. Photo courtesy Get This! Gallery.

Nothing in De Jesus’ work is static. Whether it is the rays that extend outward from the composition center in El Camino or the Miro-esque fluidity of line in Exhaust, the images appear to be constantly moving. De Jesus speaks to the instability and transience of her childhood through the dynamic feel of each of these pieces. The car itself is the vehicle for her childhood memories, but the emotion of the work is described in the uncertainty of abstraction and the movement of her lines.

De Jesus gives us a graphic autobiography that is simultaneously cryptic in its meaning, but also unabashedly open and sincere in what we are allowed to see. The give and take of accessibility in the work is enticing and left me happily searching for more.

Look for Get This! Gallery’s next exhibition, Life Iconic, curated by Jiha Moon opening January 22.