Jenny Hager
Lives and works in Los Angeles
I have chosen a more abstract format for my work over representation, though such rigid categorizations make me uncomfortable. By utilizing an abstracted format that remains open and slightly ambiguous, I seek to bypass categorization through language structures.
Through the centralization of negation and reinterpretation, repainting and redrawing, beginning from a sense of internalized place located within experience, past and present. I seek to sustain an associative dialogue within the work that enables me to find a space that embodies layers of internal/external, invented/ real, and the abject physical/ metaphoric body and a sense of place. As I’ve continued to make the work, the experience of ordinary day to day living (such as my three year old son’s interests) has infiltrated the work, as well as the scope of distance.
I have been working with a symbol system that I feel is universal, but also highly personal. Ambiguity is important within the work, as I find this symbol system to be fluid and I feel that the work takes on different references for different people. I believe the content is carried through anthropomorphic and organic elements with the themes of passage and surveillance juxtaposed against constructed spaces or some kind of impediment. I seek to inject subtexts through formal elements such as pressure, asymmetric balance and lack of “finish”.