Baker Artist Portfolios

Jimmy Joe Roche is an interdisciplinary artist whose work encompasses video, sculpture, and performance. He runs the record label Ultraviolet Light and co-curates New Works, a screening series dedicated to showcasing film and video artists based in Baltimore. He is a Senior Lecturer in the Film and Media Studies Department at Johns Hopkins University, and holds a BFA from S.U.N.Y. Purchase in Film and an MFA from MICA in Studio Art. Roche has two human children, Marlowe and Otto. 

His work has been screened many places, including the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, the Museum of the Moving Image, and the Chicago Underground Film Festival. Roche has had five solo exhibitions in New York, Texas, and Colorado, and his artwork is in the permanent collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Roche has created commissioned work for Adult Swim, Dazed and Confused Magazine, Incubate Arts Festival and Harvestworks. 

"In his book Subjective Realist Cinema, Matthew Campora posits that for a film to truly represent the experience of being alive it must incorporate the instinctive and irrational inner worlds of the mind, memory, and dreams. Much of my work has attempted to articulate these hidden, subjective spaces while exploring the collective unconscious of the United States. In Mike Kelley's installations and videos, I find a critique of American ritual and unfettered late capitalism that inspires my practice. Performance and text are important elements in both our work, perhaps guided by William Burroughs assertion that, “language is a virus from outer space”. I respond to the “clusterfuck” or “trash” aesthetics of artists engaging with the subconscious through ephemera and cultural detritus, like Kelley, John Waters, Harmony Korine, Jonah Freedman and Justin Lowe, but I also draw inspiration from the elegant, analog investigations of filmmakers like Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage." -- Jimmy Joe Roche