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JESSA CARTA*

  1. Rhizomatic Repair(2023)

  2. Trash & Treasure(2023)

  3. Exchange Rate(2023)

  5. Veriditas(2021)

  6. Night Blindness(2021)

  7. Twin Origin(2022)

  8. Breath Type(2021)

  9. Dead Reckoning(2018)

  10. LAND LAND(2017-present)

  11. Lifespan Of A Memory(2019)

  12. Resting Eye Monument(2016)

  13. Charcoal Gestures(2020)

  14. Because I Was Standing(2017)

  15. Continuous Connected(2016)

  16. LOVECITYLOVE(2013-2016)

  17. Things People Say


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Jessa Carta is an omnidisciplinary artist and creative project consultant. She is compelled towards rhizomatic frameworks, pattern literacy and the healing power of ritual containers. Jessa is attuned to the ineffable wiggliness of nature and its harmonious systems/structures in equal measure.

Jessa’s work tracks the leading lines of value, identity and performativity and plays host and witness to the cycles of life <> death <> life present in our ecosystems and egosystems.

Jessa is a deep empath who opens herself to the collective unconscious and vows to give it expression. Her fierce belief in understanding and respecting authentic truths has led her down a path of seismic connections. What she creates has been described as possessing“a rare mythic perspective”, “assertions of feminine power” and Jessa herself has been referred to as “an underworld intermediary”.

Jessa is currently the prime mover of arts-based research project LAND LAND. Jessa is a founding member of the Seattle-based experimental collective LOVECITYLOVE - a diverse, accessible, and inclusive secular art church. Her education and research has included  certifications as a natural builder, permaculturalist and solidarity economist. These interests intersect to net a practice committed to the regenaissance.

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*Jessa’s patrilineal last name is Carter which means messenger, mail carrier or a person who carts goods. In a move towards fewer belongings and more belonging, less doing and more being, Carta replaces “the messenger” for the message itself from the Latin “paper” “map”.

Exchange Rate

(2023)
Witnessing & Embodied Portraiture Rooted In Reciprocity




Have you been craving a photo of yourself that isn’t just beautiful but really, actually, truly feels like it translates your essence and energy? Even in this opti-centric era there are so many of us that feel discomfort with images of ourselves and have unmet needs in the “being seen” department.

This imaging making practice emerged from over a decade of making fashion and wellness images as my primary source of income while developing my artistic practice outside the bounds of what can be monetized. Exchange rate merges these worlds to coax images made from play, care, protracted presence and platonic intimacy. The roles of seer and seen become malleable as we exchange vulnerability in equal measure. This means you also get a chance to be the photographer.  

My friend, Laura Sullivan Cassidy, calls acts of self acknowledgement and radical self love “mirror polishing”. Exchange rate could be described this way. If we are all mirrors for one another then the clearer our image of self, the clearer we’re able to see others. Our time together will be a radical act of self love as a way of loving the collective. By allowing yourself this opportunity to be seen and receiving what's being reflected back, the nuanced and glorious “youness” in this moment, you will be better able to offer such reflection reflection in return.

Within each of us there are multitudes, all calling out to be seen and expressed. The Greeks and many other ancient cultures revered performance as an essential tool for catharsis or edu-tainment with the goal of standing both in and outside of ourselves to witness while also being witnessed by another.

Our lives are full of beginnings, endings, transitions and thresholds. These are all ideal times for this practice. The act of witnessing helps to metabolize these transformational moments.

Together we’ll move through prompts or “scores” that give time and space to the purest energies, stories and desires at play in your life so that we can channel them into images we create together and co authors.

We will practice consent, nervous system co-regulation, collaboration with the unknown and asking the known how to honor it.



$600 includes :
2-3 hour session
8 images

*additional images from our session can be purchased à la carte


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Many thanks to Kendra Dailey and Lana Sharp for being my very first exchange rate partners.