Artist Statement
Testament
I am curious about how relationships survive, why they dissolve, how people love one another, and how such love is expressed. In this work, I am investigating heavy burdens and how we carry them. I am interested in the spiritual labor of bearing weight, submission, futileness, and persistence.
To create the work, I rented an empty house for a year, and transformed it into a makeshift sanctuary, a freighted space for constructing photographs. I chose this house because it reminds me very much of the house I grew up in. It has a worn-in, gentle quality, and I felt connected to it the moment I walked through the door. In the photographs, each room is styled with sentimental textiles, trinkets, and colors that I remember from my 1980’s childhood home.
I fabricated sculptural objects for each image, using materials such as wool, linen, clay, human hair, and beeswax. The materials borrow symbolic language from the Bible, and create alter-like, fleshy masses. I imagine the house as a gateway, the silent space just before crossing over. The people in the photographs are in the final phase of bearing weight, moments away from finally laying it down. I am seeking the moment of relief, and relishing in the moments just before it occurs.
Medic
Medic is a sensitive, intricate glimpse into human relationships during times of need and recovery, and a heartfelt exploration of sacrificial love. The work began wholly on one sentence whispered by my husband while we endured a deeply unsettling time together. He held my hand, lay close to me and said softly "I just wish I could take the pain from your body, and put it into mine." I have been fortunate to know incredible love all my life, but at that moment I became suddenly and intensely aware of the magnificent power that exists between people who care for one another. When I was anxious and fighting to fall asleep each night, I began to invent miracle machines; contraptions that heal, deliver hope, legacy, remedy, and redemption. Each image from Medic is a thoughtful invention, strange and tender, revealing facets of the delicate human heart.
Process Statement
Flora
Flora is a collection of five photographs drawn from a long, solemn walk through the corridors and grounds of San Francisco's infamous prison, Alcatraz. I am still fascinated, as many are, by the weight of the structure, the sounds of metal, concrete; strange forms and repeated lines, cold surfaces, flickering yellow lights and small confined spaces. More than this, however, I am enamored by the flora of the island, the pristine gardens and incredible variety of plant life surrounding Alcatraz, all tended by prisoners who were incarcerated years ago. In this work, plant life from Alcatraz has been photographed and placed together with the female figure on linen cloth to represent the specimen, the curious and fantastical concept of the ideal woman, her form, figure, and fragile beauty. Each woman is presented as an icon, almost religious in nature, staged, and doll-like. With continued growth and new life surrounding each figure, I hope to suggest renewal, re-invention, and resilience. Flora is an illustration of perception, perfectionism, and confinement, coupled with an earnest celebration of the woman, her nature, and her continued strength.
Jennifer B Thoreson is a young visual artist creating staged imagery that is both artistically stylized and meticulously crafted. Drawing inspirations from themes of faith and the intricacy of personal relationships, Jennifer is a dynamic and emotional illustrator of the human heart. The work is soulful, seeking the use of the forgotten or discarded, heavily symbolic, eerie and quiet. She references her faith and spirituality to bring insight and awareness, using heartfelt, acutely mapped personal experiences.
Jennifer holds an MFA from the University of New Mexico. She is an international speaker and lecturer whose programs are sought after year after year by many professional public and private photographic organizations. Jennifer published her first monograph, Medic, in 2012. She has just completed her latest major body of work entitled Testament, a series of twelve images exploring love relationships and heavy burdens they sustain. Jennifer’s work has been a part of more than 30 exhibitions, has been widely published internationally in many print and online journals, and is represented by three major galleries across the United States.
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