NARRATOR:

This is Narkissos, made by Jess between 1976 and 1991.  Almost six feet high and five feet wide, this densely detailed collage is made from cut-and-pasted paper and drawings done in graphite pencil and gouache paint. The overall tint is the yellow of old, faded newspapers. Every inch of the surface is filled with images, many quite small. In the middle, just to the left of center, is the largest figure in the collage, a naked male youth, kneeling and gazing downward. This is Narcissus. He is lean and muscular with a head of pale hair. He has been drawn in graphite in a realistic style, except for his left hand, which looks cartoonish and holds a backscratcher. Just to the left of his head, the words “is love enough” are drawn in large, decorative capital letters. From his right hand, he dangles a 1950s Krazy Kat comic strip. Above Narcissus, to the right, a second naked, muscular male, slightly smaller in scale, stands atop a mound of rock holding a bow and arrow. His eyes have been cut out, leaving only eerie black holes. The artist has placed him against a backdrop of a large urban building marked by dozens of windows. To the right of the building—filling the right-center of the canvas to the frame—is a Western landscape, a river cutting through a rocky canyon. Moving clockwise from here to the lower right corner, we find a pot of long-stemmed irises. Continuing clockwise, the bottom of the canvas shows a black body of water laden with lily pads, flowers, an image of the Grim Reaper with two skeletons, a small Star of David, and a larger pentagram. Continuing up the left side of the painting, the canvas is dense with various small, grotesque figures, skulls, and a bird in flight. Continuing to the upper left corner of the collage, we see a spider-web shape, in which every triangle of the web features a singe human eye with a startled expression. Moving across the top of the painting, rightward, we find a Sphinx, a honeycomb and bees, a Japanese print of a flock of birds, and a female diver in an old-fashioned swimsuit, twisting in midair near the upper right corner of the painting. These are only some of the most prominent images in this collage.