Jess Loseby is slick. Well, maybe Jess herself isn't slick; I mean, I'm sure she doesn't shine in certain turns of light (or maybe she does?), but her art is slick. And that, despite all the often pejorative implications attached to the word slick, is actually a good thing.
I first learned of Jess' work through the rhizome list-serv, where I remember, either earlier this year or late last, her posting a link to a piece (I believe it was The Dream...go there now...see what I mean by slick? All those ominous somehow phosphorescent black clouds floating a steely gray poetry across the sun-warped negative of what looks like a stranded child...and the music, by her husband, musician Clive Loseby...). At the time, I was on dial-up, and loading this piece seemed to take forever. Happily, now, I use a cable connection, so I can view The Dream as much as I want to, whenever I want to.
Jess' work was brought back to me as part of a feature at furtherfield.org (http://www.furtherfield.org/home.html), a rather subversive art site (check out all the ertoic material there, especially The Feeler Twins' take on the "nature" of the erotic, wink wink) that seems a strange place for her brand of cyber-domesticity to take root. And yet, despite Jess' claims of domesticity, there is something rather feral in some of these works (the threat of that child being carried away by wolves pervades The Dream, and fear itself comes under the slippery Loseby lens in Code Scares Me, where a short poem --"If i could only get rid/of this darkness//I could see you//and you could see/me"--gets buried in floating skein of html code the user can manipulate slightly by way of a few small click boxes at the bottom on the
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