Between Microscopy and Imagination
Jess Holz has built a practice that transforms scientific observation into something profoundly emotional and visually disorienting. Working across photography, microscopy, moving image, and installation, she creates immersive encounters with organisms and structures that normally remain hidden from human perception. Her work exists at the intersection of biology and image-making, where plankton, cellular matter, and microscopic decay become dynamic subjects charged with vitality and vulnerability. Rather than presenting scientific imagery as detached documentation, Holz approaches the microscope as both a creative instrument and a philosophical lens. Through this perspective, microscopic life begins to resemble vast alien terrains, fragile ecological systems, and living abstractions all at once. The resulting works invite viewers to reconsider the scale at which beauty, complexity, and emotion can exist.
Photography entered Holz’s life early, long before her professional involvement in neuroscience laboratories and electron microscopy research. At thirteen, she built a darkroom in her parents’ basement and became captivated by photographic experimentation, particularly infrared film, solarization, and alternative processes that distorted ordinary vision. These early explorations established a fascination with hidden realities and unstable forms of perception that still defines her work today. During her undergraduate studies, she encountered a scanning electron microscope while studying cricket chemosensory organs for a biology project. The encounter radically altered her understanding of image-making. Biological structures magnified through electron microscopy appeared to her as uncanny monochrome landscapes filled with texture, depth, and unfamiliar geometry. Those discoveries eventually led to the Umbra series, where insect and plant fragments became surreal black-and-white compositions that blurred distinctions between scientific imagery and landscape photography.
Professional work in neuroscience has further deepened Holz’s philosophical relationship to imaging systems. As a research fellow performing electron microscopy for connectome research, she spends her days examining ultrathin sections of preserved brain tissue with scientific precision. Yet outside the laboratory, those same technologies become tools for speculation and sensory exploration. She has grown increasingly interested in how optical systems distort, destabilize, and reinterpret reality rather than simply recording it faithfully. Imaging artifacts, visual noise, and technical irregularities fascinate her because they reveal the instability embedded within supposedly objective technologies. This attraction to uncertainty continues to shape her artistic language, allowing microscopy to function not only as observation but also as an imaginative and emotional encounter with forms of life that resist easy categorization.
Jess Holz: The Emotional Life of Plankton
In recent years, Holz has shifted her attention away from preserved biological fragments and toward living aquatic microorganisms collected throughout New England. Rivers, ponds, swamps, and coastal environments around Massachusetts have become both source material and collaborative ecosystems within her studio practice. Working primarily with a Leica DMRB microscope, she documents copepods, ciliates, rotifers, worms, and countless drifting organisms through timelapse microscopy, fluorescence imaging, and high-speed video. Her process often involves observing samples for hours as ecological interactions slowly unfold beneath the lens. What emerges is not conventional scientific illustration, but a portrait of microscopic existence as fluid, expressive, and emotionally charged. Organisms pulse, shed membranes, feed, decompose, and transform continuously, revealing biological systems in states of constant transition.
Central to Holz’s work is an interest in permeability and unstable boundaries between bodies, species, and environments. Earlier projects examined human skin through scanning electron microscopy, printing enlarged textures onto fabric embroidered with poetry. That fascination with bodily thresholds evolved further through her prolonged engagement with plankton and single-celled organisms. Watching membranes rupture, cytoplasm flow, and microorganisms gather around decomposition has fundamentally changed her understanding of life and identity. Human biology no longer appears separate from microscopic systems but deeply continuous with them. Many of the structures and behaviors she observes under magnification exist within human bodies as well, creating a conceptual bridge between microscopic ecologies and human embodiment. Through this perspective, her imagery suggests that individuality itself may be more porous and interconnected than people often imagine.
The emotional force of Holz’s work also emerges through duration. Rather than capturing singular frozen moments, she frequently uses timelapse accumulation and layered motion to reveal biological processes unfolding over time. This approach allows movement itself to become a form of mark-making within the image. One especially significant work, Plankton Painting 4/14/25 #16, Charles River, captures the early stages of decay within a Chydorus water flea specimen collected from the Charles River. In the piece, decomposition becomes strangely active and generative rather than static. Cells disperse outward, Vorticella create swirling feeding currents, and biological collapse transforms into an ecosystem of new activity. Internal structures remain visible while the body simultaneously dissolves into surrounding water. The image holds beauty and deterioration in unresolved tension, presenting death as a process deeply intertwined with continued life.
Systems of Seeing and Technological Wonder
The technologies Holz uses are not merely technical instruments within her practice but active collaborators that shape perception itself. Several years spent working at an imaging core facility at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology exposed her to advanced microscopy systems and broadened her understanding of how visual technologies behave. Instead of pursuing flawless scientific accuracy, she became increasingly captivated by distortions, glitches, and unpredictable artifacts generated through imaging systems. Charging artifacts in electron microscopy, for example, could bend biological structures into forms resembling fluid turbulence or warped spacetime. These unstable moments fascinated her because they disrupted assumptions about neutrality and objectivity. Through such encounters, technology ceased functioning as transparent documentation and instead became an expressive medium capable of producing emotional and surreal experiences.
Influences from experimental photography and cinema continue to shape this approach. Holz cites Man Ray and Jean Painlevé as formative inspirations, particularly for their willingness to approach scientific imagery through curiosity, manipulation, and visual experimentation. Man Ray’s darkroom techniques resonated strongly with her own teenage fascination with altered photographic processes, while Painlevé’s films demonstrated how marine organisms could be portrayed with both scientific rigor and poetic strangeness. Conversations with artists such as Marn Lucas have also reinforced her interest in imaging systems that reveal realities beyond ordinary human sight. Thermal imaging, infrared video, and fluorescence systems all contribute to a broader artistic inquiry into how technologies expand sensory experience and alter human understanding of the body and environment.
At the same time, Holz’s deepest influences increasingly come from prolonged observation itself. Years spent studying plankton daily have created an extensive mental archive of species, behaviors, ecological interactions, and seasonal changes. The organisms she encounters are no longer anonymous scientific subjects but familiar presences with recognizable patterns and rhythms. She speaks about developing emotional attachment to the cultures maintained within her studio and to the environments from which they originate. This sustained intimacy transforms her practice into something closer to ecological companionship than detached study. Observing microorganisms continuously has also sharpened her awareness of vitality within decomposition and collapse. Rather than treating life and death as opposing conditions, her work presents them as intertwined biological states unfolding simultaneously within every microscopic ecosystem.
Jess Holz: Immersion Beyond the Microscope
Holz’s current studio practice is increasingly moving beyond still imagery and toward immersive sensory environments. Much of her artistic work takes place during nights and weekends outside her neuroscience research schedule, allowing the microscope to function as a site of improvisation rather than structured scientific analysis. Samples gathered from local waterways become evolving ecosystems observed over long durations, with chance determining what enters the microscope’s field of view at any given moment. Even after years of observation, she continues discovering unfamiliar organisms, feeding behaviors, and ecological relationships hidden within a single drop of water. This unpredictability remains essential to her process because it preserves a sense of wonder and openness within the act of looking itself.
The sheer scale of her archive reflects the intensity of this commitment. Over the past two years, Holz has accumulated roughly eight terabytes of plankton footage through timelapse recording, fluorescence microscopy, differential interference contrast imaging, and high-speed video. Increasingly, she sees this growing archive not simply as raw material but as an evolving ecological record documenting fleeting interactions and seasonal transformations invisible to most people. The accumulation of footage mirrors the endless complexity of the microscopic environments she studies, where countless interactions unfold simultaneously beyond immediate human awareness. Through this expanding body of material, her work becomes both artistic practice and long-term observational ecology.
Looking ahead, Holz hopes to expand these ideas into larger immersive installations incorporating projection, sculptural surfaces, responsive lighting, layered sound, and interactive environments. Her ambition is not simply to display plankton imagery, but to create spaces where viewers can physically and emotionally enter the microscopic aquatic systems she studies. Through these environments, she aims to collapse the perceived distance between human observers and the fragile ecosystems that sustain planetary life, encouraging a deeper awareness of ecological interconnectedness at scales often overlooked entirely.
