“What Remains Unsaid”
Medium: Acrylic
Jessica Stokes confronts the divide between the public image of military service and the private realities experienced by women within it. Drawing from her own experience as a veteran, her work challenges the expectation of strength, composure, and silence often placed on female service members, where visibility is limited and complexity is frequently overlooked.
In this painting, a civilian figure stands before her reflection in uniform, fractured by a cracked mirror and silenced by tape across the mouth. As she removes the tape, the gesture becomes one of resistance—an interruption of silence rather than a resolution of it. The reflection remains partially obscured, suggesting that even in the act of speaking, not everything can be fully expressed or understood.
By confronting the viewer with this moment, Stokes disrupts the polished image of the uniform and redirects attention to what it conceals.
