Montana Xibalba: Translation #2
American, born 1923

Oil on canvas mounted on wood
29 3/4 x 33 inches

In 1949, after working for the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, between 1944 and 1946, Jess envisioned the earth being destroyed in the year 1975. This fear, undoubtedly part of a more pervasive anxiety experienced internationally following the devastation of World War II, inspired Jess to move to San Francisco and become an artist in an attempt to rediscover a sense of value in society. Montana Xibalba, an example from his Translation series, is part of a grand meditation on science, myth, and art. Each Translation is a faithful reproduction in oil paint of a photograph, engraving, or black-and-white reproduction whose image has mythic meaning to the artist. In Montana Xibalba, Jess has reproduced a photograph of a soccer game from a University of Montana yearbook that he found in a junk shop. Six to eight slowly and meditatively applied layers of paint result in an image that appears to have grown into being, almost like a mold. Jess recognized the soccer game as a symbol of the cosmological myth from the Mayan civilization in which the birth of the sun and the moon resulted from a ball game between two earthly heroes and the Lords of Xibalba, a realm akin to Hades, or hell. The yellow ball represents the sun and the peculiar-looking athletes, the heroes.