Jessica Lichtenstein: Delicious Torment

In Delicious Torment, Lichtenstein explores feelings at the limit of human vocabulary through plaster heart sculptures, cracking and overflowing with engraved lockets. Foregoing traditional platitudes of love for complicated, contradictory phrases, each locket attempts to truthfully express matters of the heart— the real thoughts and feelings we cannot quite seem to articulate but feel as deeply as the symbolism of a heart-shaped gift. Lichtenstein uses oxymorons and supposed non sequiturs to forge poetry about the vast expanses of human emotion, within literal vessels of tenderness and vulnerability.

“What happens is a heart bursting with universal dreams, insecurities, fears, desires, and thoughts both negative and positive— political climate, racial climate, indecencies, romanticism— all the ingredients that make us who we are… Delicious Torment: this thing called life, this thing called love, this thing called being human.” — Jessica Lichtenstein

Jessica Lichtenstein‘s work has been exhibited across the country in New York, Oklahoma, Washington, California, and Colorado, and internationally in Hong Kong and Germany. She received a BA from Yale University, and is currently based out of New York and Wyoming.