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8/1/2010

Amy Jenkins

Athica - Athens Institute for Contemporary Art, Athens

curated by Lizzie Zucker Saltz

ATHICA: Athens Institute for Contemporary Art is excited to bring northeast Georgia Nurture: Video and Photography by Amy Jenkins. The exhibit marks three firsts for ATHICA: it is our first focusing on the personal yet universal issues of parenting and breast-feeding, our first large-scale video-art exhibit, and our first full-run solo artist exhibition.* The works, curated by ATHICA Artistic Director Lizzie Zucker Saltz, are from Jenkins’ stunning Cradle series, in which the artist films herself and members of her family in order to reveal salient aspects of familial relationships. In the artist’s words: “Visceral and emotional, these personal narratives offer a window into intimate life, where the commonplace becomes surprising and unexpected.“ We are delighted to be hosting Jenkins’ first solo exhibition south of Kentucky, which follows two decades of the New Hampshire-based artist’s exhibiting at national and international museums and galleries. (The artist and the curator’s biographies can be found at the end of this document.)

Jenkins often employs classically inspired compositions of tastefully arranged nudes set against dense black backgrounds, which she then videotapes and photographs, the chaste aesthetic highlighting the universal nature of the artist’s themes. For instance, Tug, a photograph in the format of a long horizontal strip, dramatically reveals two parents pulling at opposing ends of a bright red rope, a tot by her mother’s side. The composition elegantly condenses contemporary parents’ struggles with sharing child-rearing responsibilities into a striking image. According to the artist, Tug represents “the tension and harmony within parenthood” and “the triangular relationship of parents and child.”

A number of of Jenkins’ works will be debuting at ATHICA, such as Audrey Superhero, a new video created specifically for this ATHICA exhibit that features Jenkins’ seven-year old daughter playing dress-up as Superman, bringing up questions of nascent gender identity. We are honored also to be exhibiting an older piece, The Audrey Samsara, a soothing and sumptuous nineteen-minute video of the same Audrey five years earlier breastfeeding, while wearing bright red shoes designed by Salvatore Ferragamo, in her mother’s black-fabric draped lap. This piece provoked a censorship scandal in New York City in 2004 at the designers’ 5th Avenue gallery when a company executive found the artwork "distasteful." The surrounding publicity firestorm raised a broad range of vital issues covered by no less than six mainstream newspapers, magazines and even an academic journal: issues ranging from the general public’s ignorance of the significant health advantages and psychological benefits of breastfeeding, American society’s puritanical attitude toward the female breast even in a maternal context, a discomfort with non-sexual nudity, and the technological-era distancing from our animal natures.

The artist describes The Audrey Samsara as “a meditative, slowly unfolding video featuring the artist’s 18-month old daughter breastfeeding, falling asleep, reawakening, breastfeeding and again falling into deep sleep. This continual cycle brings to mind the notion of the life force, hence the Buddhist word ‘Samsara,’ meaning the cycle of death and rebirth. Drawing inspiration from renaissance painting, The Audrey Samsara echoes depictions of the Madonna and Child, as well as the Pieta, yet it is not idealized nor sentimental.” The work went on to be exhibited at many venues nationally and internationally.

Most of the figures in Jenkins’ oeuvre are displayed on large monitors or projected at life-scale for maximum impact. For instance, Held has the full-sized figure of the artist herself crawling nude into the lap of an eight-foot high painted rendering of Gerber-style baby ensconced in a cozy yellow snuggie, where she curls up for a brief nap, amusingly reversing the usual assumptions of who is nurturer and who is nurtured. Milky-Milk, according to the artist, is composed of “a tiny LCD video monitor showing a life-sized breast viewed from below is suspended just above head-height. Perilously clinging to the nipple is a single droplet of milk, which in a matter of minutes falls from the nipple and obscures the view of the breast. Tenderly, the woman wipes the droplet away, as if ‘cleaning up’ the viewer who has just been ‘dripped on.’” Even though both of these pieces were originally created in 2005, both will debut at ATHICA, despite Jenkins’ very active exhibition schedule, because the artist has found few venues with as much commitment to artistic freedom as ATHICA. The gallery chose to exhibit these particular works without knowing of their un-exhibited status.

Curator Lizzie Zucker Saltz is pleased, as a curator, parent, feminist, and former artist, to be presenting works that so powerfully address these central, intimate and yet often politicized themes. She first encountered Jenkins’ video installations in New York City in the early 1990’s and had wanted to find a way to show them to Athens since, and even more so after reading Jerry Cullum’s piece discussing the censoring of The Audrey in the Atlanta-based Art Papers (28.4, 2004). Public breast-feeding laws have been subject to numerous court-cases during the past decade, which has motivated activist efforts, such as the “Breastfeeding Welcome Here” stickers that can be found on many Athens’ business windows. For these reasons, as well as the issues surrounding Ms Jenkins’ Cradle series, some gallery space will be devoted to the dissemination of information on parenting resources and breastfeeding during the run of the exhibit.

Nurture: Video and Photography by Amy Jenkins opens with a reception on Saturday, January 9th from 7:00 - 9:00 p.m. Ms Jenkins and her family will be in attendance. The exhibit runs from Saturday, January 9th through Sunday, February 28, 2010. A spate of affiliated events have been planned to supplement the exhibits' thematic concerns, which are listed at the top of this release. (Subsequent releases will provide more details.) Many affiliated events are in the planning including a Curator’s Walk and Talk on Thursday January 28th, Bloodlines, A VOX Reading Series Event on Friday, February 13th, as well as Nurse-Ins, expert panelist presentations on parenting and breastfeeding involving local groups and businesses such as Full Bloom, Athens Conscious Parent, and others who promote healthy parenting choices. Babysitting services and childrens’ activities are being organized for many events. Please check the website for event times and details in the weeks ahead.

Amy Jenkins’ installations, videos, and photography have been exhibited and published internationally. Her work has received wide support from granting organizations, including New York State Council for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Jerome Foundation, the Experimental Television Center, and Aaron Siskind Foundation. She received the New Hampshire State Council for the Arts Fellowship for 2007. As a Djerassi Resident Artist in Woodside, CA, she was selected for the Hewlett-Packard Honorary Fellowship. She has also been a Harvestworks Media Artist-in-Residence in NY; other residencies include an NEA-sponsored Fellowship and residency at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, VA, and artist residencies at MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH; Yaddo, Saratoga, NY; and Light Work, Syracuse, NY. Her video Closures received the Director’s Choice Award from the Black Maria Film and Video Festival, as well as a Jury’s Choice Award at the New York Exposition of Short Film and Video.

Jenkins’ recent exhibitions include solo shows at the Brattleboro Museum in Vermont, Kustera Tilton Gallery, NYC, Sioux City Art Center, Iowa, Samson Projects, Boston, MA, and John Michael Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan, WI; as well as the museum group shows Stop. Look. Listen, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca, NY, Mixed Emotions, The Haifa Museum, Haifa, Israel; Video Art/Video Culture, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Aquaria, Oberösterreichisches Landesmuseum, Linz, Austria; New Video Artists, Cheekwood Museum, Nashville, TN; Video Jam, Palm Beach ICA, FL; Threshold, Contemporary Art Center of Virginia, VA; Current Undercurrent: Working in Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY; and Moving Image: Ten Years of Video, Anthology Film Archives, NY.

Included in the Thames and Hudson book New Media in Late Twentieth-Century Art by Michael Rush, Ms. Jenkins’ artwork has also been reviewed and reproduced in The New York Times, ARTnews, Performing Arts Journal, Aperture, Art New England, The Village Voice, Art Papers, and Bomb, among others. She is represented by Anna Kustera Gallery in New York.

Affiliated Events:
Thursday, January 28
7:00 - 8:00 p.m.
Curator’s Walk & Talk
Curator and ATHICA Director Lizzie Zucker Saltz will talk informally about the works in the exhibition and their relationship to parenting and societal attitudes about breast feeding and non-sexual nudity. Children of all ages welcome!
Free!

Friday, February 13
6:30 – 8:30 p.m.
Blood Lines: Stories & Poems of Love & Family
A VOX Reading Series Event
Readings of original works by local writers

Date(s) TBA
Expert Panels, Nurse-In Events & Kids’ activities

Closing Day Events: Sunday, Feb 28 3:00 - 6:00 p.m.
Details TBA
Free!

Opening Reception: Saturday, January 9th, 7 - 9 p.m.

ATHICA: Athens Institute for Contemporary Art
160 Tracy Street, Unit 4, Athens, GA 30601 USA
Gallery hours are: Thursdays: 6 - 9 p.m., Fridays, Saturdays & Sundays: 1 - 6 p.m. and by appointment.
free admission

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