Jacqui Ray Helps Us Come Home To Ourselves-with or without the help of lockdown.
As spineless as her body may seem, her brazen forms of self-expression are anything but shy to confrontation. Moving through a variety of mediums, Jacqui Ray shares pieces of her story (and sometimes body) as an offering to connect with her audience.
The black stage presents a tall brown figure, wearing a crown of braids and a shredded black leotard under her black shorts. Standing strong with a flamingo-style stance, she radiates confidence toward the pole she faces. Almost immediately, the strength behind the dancer deteriorates with the textured clicking of the music behind her. Broken down into a small quivering ball, she’s shot back by an invisible force of power, to which she returns to the pole with a heavy head (literally) dragging across the stage. Recollecting herself, she climbs up the pole and floats into a seated position. Before we get too comfortable, she lies back and distorts herself into an uncannily deep backbend.
Her shape-shifting continues until we find her confronting us at the top of the stage. With an unshakeable glare, the dancer transforms into an embodiment of depression, self-doubt, anxiety, and lethargy — emotions familiar to anyone on planet earth. As uninvited as these darker emotions are, they are unavoidable aspects of the human experience that Jacqui Ray illuminates through her performances.
Using the alluring factors of pole dance and surrealist paintings, Jacqui invites her audiences to experience the nature of our shadow selves. The textures of her movements and imagery act as bait to any onlooker. Before they know it, the beauty of the subject matter rears its darker counterpart.
However, the experience doesn’t stop at introducing shadows to the self. Part of her creative process is accepting the coexistence of light, dark, and even grey emotions within the housing of our beings. Rather than choosing to shut out our deepest fears, Jacqui believes it’s nicer to invite them to the table to better understand them.
“I’ve always been intrigued by morbidity, especially if it was considered ‘scary’. Mainly because it felt like a puzzle to try to understand the coded language behind the music, image, or story. Once I figure it out — the message, the cause, the emotion behind the dramatics- the subject matter becomes less terrifying, and a lot more personable…at least to me it does,” says Jacqui.
Artistically, her body is best thought of as a vehicle guiding us through the spectrum of human emotion. What many of us struggle to realize, though, is the very same spectrum exists within all of us. Moving beyond the observation and experience of emotion, the next step is creating peace by accepting the discomfort. The feeling of unconditional acceptance is how Jacqui, and most of us, choose to define as ‘home’.
Before pole dancing, Jacqui was an avid painter and visual artist. She’s painted a variety of surrealist masterpieces, including her “Fountain of Youth” painting and self-portrait “The Catch”, awarded first place at the Crocker Art Museum at only 18 years old. While one of these paintings presents a Dali-esque aspect of surrealism, with her lips acting as an over-sized water fountain in a river, the other solely narrates an unusual real-life circumstance.
“Right before I painted ‘The Catch”, I got into a life-threatening car crash where rolled my car in the middle of the freeway and came out with just one scratch. As traumatic as that was, I learned to sit comfortably with the experience as it existed within myself. I think that’s how I was able to get over it so quickly…to just allow it to exist as it was rather than avoid the memory out of fear and discomfort.”
The painting illustrates 17-year-old Jacqui, sitting in a bathtub, investigating a skinned, headless salmon. She recollects this image being a real-life photoshoot, where she shared a tub with pieces of defrosting salmon parts. Spending hours at a time with the fish during her photoshoot, it was natural to lose the initial sense of disgust and alienation in relation to the carcass.
From then on, Jacqui’s mission evolved into a ritual of welcoming and acceptance toward emotions that lurk in the shadows of our minds. By presenting a very authentic human experience in conjunction with beauty and grace, she’s made coming home an unforgettable experience.
