Amy Jenkins: CURRENT

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.

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.’” Other video pieces such as the installation Variations on Contrary Motion, and the installation Shitfit--in which the viewer peers through a miniature doorway in to a child’s room, only to see a small video of the artist emulating a child’s tantrum--meditate on having children.

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 Samsara 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, a portion of the gallery will be devoted to the dissemination of information on parenting resources and breastfeeding during the run of the exhibit. A spate of affiliated events are planned that will also help raise awareness of breastfeeding issues while providing entertainment for children, the first of which, Milky-Milk Time: a pro-breast-feeding event, is being organized by Athens Conscious Parent and Full Bloom Pregnancy and Early Parenting Center. Guest essayist Mary Jessica Hammes will be contributing an essay to the Nurture exhibition catalog detailing the benefits of breastfeeding and its relation to nudity in American culture and art through the ages.

N e w E x h i b i t i o n

Mixed Emotions

Haifa Museum of Art

Opening: February 18^th, 2006

Mixed Emotions is the first exhibition to be curated by Tami Katz-Freiman in her new position as chief curator of the Haifa Museum of Art.

The exhibition will explore a wide range of human feelings, from the most negative (hate, anger, rage, sorrow, frustration, shame, alienation and estrangement) to the most positive ones (maternal love, romantic love, happiness, joy, compassion, desire, gratitude, yearning, intimacy and hope), as they are represented in contemporary Israeli and international art.

Conceived of as the dialectical opposite of reason, emotion was repressed and excluded from the public sphere within modernity. Recently, there's been a change in social, cultural, and scientific perceptions of emotion. Whereas in the past emotions were conceived as mysterious phenomena with no rational explanation (whose expression was perceived as childishness, lack of control and a tendency to unexpected reactions), and as a form of interference in the rational thinking process; today, as part of the development of what is called the “science of emotions,” feelings have been elevated to a new, more esteemed status in public life.

In the contemporary Israeli context, the media images of the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip are one striking example reflecting the change that has occurred in the way Israeli society confronts emotion. The summer of 2005 was etched in the Israeli collective consciousness in the form of a blazing emotional furnace. The slogan “with sensitivity and determination” hovered around as an ethical code that dictated the army’s conduct. The sight of innumerable addictive scenes of hugs and tears among soldiers, policemen and settlers made it seem as if a big floodgate had burst and a massive wave of refined emotion flooded the whole country. Some called this emotional swirl a “crying ritual,” some called it “the wailing festival”; in any event, it seemed that as if these manipulative images were competing for emotional rating – a fact that raises innumerable questions and thoughts about empathy, identification and rejection.

At the end of August, a new television series called “In Therapy” was launched on Israeli cable TV. Focusing daily on therapy sessions between a psychotherapist and his five patients, the series is considered to be a cinematic breakthrough. Following the withdrawal from Gaza, Israeli TV watchers have found themselves in front of their mirror reflection – sitting daily on the psychotherapist’s couch, torn apart and ready as never before to deal with their emotional and psychological complexities. Rami Heuberger, one of the actors in this television series, has put it well by saying that: “Today, if someone doesn’t go to therapy — he’s screwed. In the past someone that went to a shrink was considered to be psycho – today it just means that you are connected to yourself”.

The exhibition Mixed Emotions will seek to respond to, and to echo these changes: it brings into the spotlight the representation of human emotions that were excluded for many years by the modernist ethos to the shallow margins of “kitsch” and "schmaltz." It thus marks a central tendency that appeared in the 1980s and developed during the 1990s to refute the hierarchy between body and soul, and to blur the binary opposition of reason and emotion.

The works for Mixed Emotions have not been selected on the basis of the passion that had led to their creation nor of the affect may they produce in the viewer. Rather, these works are linked by their interest in taking on some aspect of emotion itself as their subject matter.

The exhibition will examine the differences between conceptual and emotional representations; it will investigate the affinity between emotion and language, the way in which emotion is externalized through body language, facial expressions, smiling and crying; it will also examine representations of emotion in Israeli political reality, in adolescent agony, in romantic love, and feelings like compassion and yearning in parent-child relationships.

The multi-cultural nature of this exhibition’s subject calls for the participation of both Israeli and international artists who work in various media: painting, sculpture, photography, installation, and video art. Among the participating artists are: Nelly Agassi, Hernan Bas, Boyan, Ofir Dor, Kate Gilmore, Nan Goldin, Nir Hod, Erez Israeli, Amy Jenkins, Eva Koch, Muntean / Rosenblum, Naomi Fisher, Netaly Schlosser, Eli Petel, Jack Pierson, Aïda Ruilova, Bill Viola, and Pavel Wolberg.

Flow and The Audrey Samsara
Installations by Amy Jenkins
May 1 - July 31
Multimedia artist Amy Jenkins combines video projection, performance, sculpture, and audio to present miniature replicas of domestic dramas. Flow, filmed in her bath and projected into a miniature tub, traces the nine months of Jenkins' pregnancy. The Audrey Samsara features the artist's 18-month-old daughter in a cycle of breastfeeding, falling asleep, and waking, suggesting the notion of the life force (hence "samsara") as well as classic Madonna-and-child images.

K U S T E R A
T I L T O N
G A L L E R Y

520 West 21 Street
New York, NY 10011
T/ 212 989 0082
F/ 212 989 0456

AMY JENKINS
“Cradle”
February 17 - March 26, 2005

Opening Reception: Thursday, February 17, 6-8pm

Click on images above to see larger installation views of the exhibitions.

Amy Jenkins’ newest video installations combine image, sound and sculpture to create narrative environments that explore universal human experiences, such as pregnancy, nurturing, sleep, and motherhood. She re-examines humanist themes rooted in classical art traditions through the modern medium of three-dimensional video projection. Jenkins offers us a window into her intimate family life in which the commonplace becomes surprising and unexpected.

The Audrey Samsara is a 19-minute 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 andrebirth. Drawing inspiration from renaissance painting, The Audrey Samsara echoes depictions of the Madonna and Child, as well as the Pieta. Naked but for a pair of too-big red shoes, the child gives herself over to the mother’s nourishing and protective arms.

Last May, The Audrey Samsara was censored from its first scheduled public exhibition at the New York 5th Avenue store/gallery of designer Salvatore Ferragamo, when a company executive found the artwork "distasteful." Articles have been published regarding the artwork in Art Papers, the National Coalition Against Censorship newsletter, The NY Daily News, The Boston Globe, and others. This will be its first public showing in New York.

Another work featured in the show, among others, will be Flow, a nine minute piece that was filmed monthly (one minute per month) during the artist’s pregnancy. A projected image of water fills a miniature bathtub into which a woman climbs, crossing the static bounds of space and object. As the woman bathes, one begins to notice her belly slowly swelling into apparent pregnancy. Water has been a central element of many of Jenkins’ artworks, as a metaphor for the subconscious as well as for its ritual aspects.

Jenkins’ installations and photography have been shown extensively, most recently at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, WI; Sioux City Art Center in Sioux City, IA and the Oberosterreichische Landsgalerie in Linz, Austria. This will be the artist’s third solo show in New York.