Jacey Coca uses photography and beadwork to explore her Mexican and Korean heritage as part of an evolving creative practice examining identity, memory, and nostalgia.
Phoenix, Arizona| jaceycoca.com | @jaceysphotodiary
For as long as she can remember, artist Jacey Coca has been surrounded by photographs. “I was three or four when I started using a Polaroid camera,” she recalls. “I still love going through photos at my grandmother’s house.” As a child, she’d often spend time there making scrapbooks or paper dolls. Today, she’s an emerging artist working in the Phoenix metro area where she uses photography and other media to explore themes of identity, memory, and nostalgia.
Recently she’s been working on Splitting Cells, a mixed-media project in which she makes “little beaded mosaics or likenesses of old family photographs.” Coca started beading during the COVID-19 pandemic, in part to allay feelings of anxiety. But she was also inspired by her grandmother’s jewelry-making and the craft’s importance in Mexican culture. “I come from a half-Korean and half-Mexican family,” she explains. For Coca, this body of work “involves both the shedding of tradition and family ideals, as well as the exploration of freedom and identity.”
Coca graduated from Arizona State University in Tempe with a BFA in 2022, where she learned a variety of alternative photographic techniques that inform her current art practice. Wanting to put her own spin on lumen prints, a camera-less process that uses the sun to “develop” images of objects placed on silver gelatin photographic paper, she decided to place her own body on the paper. “The Arizona heat is very cruel and intense, which makes me think about the male gaze and surveillance [of] women,” she says.
Noting her own feelings of duality and experiences with being fetishized because of her appearance, Coca says she plans to continue exploring her own identity through art. “I don’t make art for anybody else,” she says. “The process is sacred, and it’s mine. Personal art is important and should not be dismissed. It is a mirror not only to the artist but their environment.”
