I’ve generally referred to myself as a painter over an artist. For over two decades, painting has been the gateway and culprit for the paradigm shifts that have redefined my output visions. As a young art student, it was through paint that I intuitively discovered sacred geometry and developed a secret coded language specific to my experiences, dreams and premonitions. As a young woman, I stubbornly refused to buy into the worship of famous painters since the field was and is still dominated and ruled by men. As a painter I explored weaving, printmaking, metalsmithing, sculptural fabrics, and dimensional wall pieces that represented interpretations of eras and origins of decorative design. I wanted to love and converse with the feminist “pattern and decoration” movement of the 1970’s. I wanted to remind the art world that the average human cares just as much about the color or pattern of their wallpaper as they do about the painting they chose to put above the couch, and that it wasn’t the modernists that “invented” abstraction. While studying painting at an esteemed old boys club (Kansas City Art Institute), I was appalled by having multiple teachers tell me I needed to go spend more time with DeKooning(not Elaine), and disgusted by how influenced so many of the dudes in the department were by artists like David Salle. Then there was the time that a teacher hired a stripper to prance around the drawing class with a bullwhip and a police hat while he scribbled a messy orgasm all over his paper(instead of instructing us). That same professor told me that my geometric abstract paintings were about sex.
The moral of the former rant is intended to lay the grounds for my love/hate relationship with the historical baggage that painting carries. Epic, large-scale paintings have been the platform that has offered me a conducive substrate for what I consider pure invention. It was through painting that I created storms as fluid outlets for my climate change anxieties and recurring end of the world nightmares. It was paintings of exotic jeweled island resurrections that led me to the Maldives (the island nation going underwater that has driven the vast majority of my “free-from alter ego” work). Yet, the physical process of painting is literally a neck breaker, and I can no longer look down, up, or hold my arm up for very long without the accompaniment of severe pain, yet I’ve not given up my devotion to this medium.
Over the past couple of years I’ve developed alter egos that serve many purposes. Wendy Well is a post-apocalyptic interior decorator that’s obsessed with dirty energy (primarily fracking, but also oil and coal). Joan Dare is a Senators wife from Kansas and she spends her days doing cultural activities, organizing tea parties, talking about the weather, and scheming to open her own art gallery. Through the process of working with these alter egos I’ve found that embracing latent aspects of ones personality, hidden desires or disgust plays a roll in tolerance. Humans have a tendency to define themselves in ways that are too easily categorized. Assimilation within groups of people creates dividing walls of separation. And the wrath of this disconnect was explicitly exposed during and ever present now in the aftermath the 2016 election.
Jenna North February 2018
...................................................................................................................................... My work investigates natural/virtual phenomenon as seen through energy fields of pattern and chaos created through a vast array of mediums to simulate extreme weather and natural/human produced disasters. Being highly experimental, my process is often physical, much like an alchemist, choosing substance and form for their inherent conceptual associations and transformative chemical/optical properties. My painting process further coagulates the conceptual/material dichotomy by heating/burning, flooding and painting directly on water. As an interdisciplinary artist with a seemingly limitless base of mediums; painting remains central, and my identity with this complex substance spills into my sculptural installations, video and performance. This investigative approach to material and conceptual experiments is serious, sensuous and mischievous.
The current work oscillates between two distinct, yet interconnected projects. Prior to leaving San Francisco to move to central New York I was unaware of hydrofracking, and rashly introduced by the looming black and red yard signs, banners and bumper stickers. It was around this time that I had to come to terms with putting my Underwater Maldives project on hold, due to the political unrest of a military coup. The two efforts are similar in that my initial approach, interest and vision came from a naive standpoint of an onlooker questioning the destructive impact of the human demands on nature. In Underwater Maldives the idea is to create the illusion of the water flooding a section of the capital island, Male’, bringing awareness to the consequences of our interdependent, global economy on the Maldives and other low-lying islands in the Asia-Pacific region. As it became more and more difficult to continue working on the Maldives project, my creative inspiration shifted to the local level as I began developing a fracking obsessed artist alter ego named Wendy Well, who views the world through an opportunistic lens, curiously interacting with, collecting and combining objects that are reminiscent of her research and limited knowledge of the hydrofracking industry.