Jenny Hager
Lives and works in Los Angeles
Member of Durden and Ray
Instagram: Hager8645
Contact:
jennyebhager@gmail.com
310-699-3137
BIO
Jenny Hager is a Los Angeles based artist, originally from Detroit, MI. She has a BA from Knox College, Illinois, a post baccalaureate from the New York Studio of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture, NYC, and an MFA in Painting from the University of Pennsylvania. She has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Knox College, West Los Angeles College, and Santa Monica College.
Jenny has received two Joan Mitchell Foundation Grants, a research grant from Knox College, a merit and teaching grant from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Professional Artist in Residence Scholarship from Ox-Bow.
She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Atlanta, London, Berlin, Brisbane, Lecce, Paros, and Budapest. She has participated in art fairs, including Miami Projects (Miami), Supermarket Art Fair (Stockholm), Spring Break (Los Angeles), and QiPO 01 (Mexico City), and her work has been shown in the Reykjavik Art Museum (ISL), the Torrence Art Museum (Los Angeles), the Riverside Art Museum (Los Angeles), the Figge Art Museum (Davenport, IA), the San Diego Art Institute (San Diego). She has also participated in the Yokohama Triennale (Japan). Hager is a member of the collective Durden and Ray (which has a gallery in the Bendix Building), in Los Angeles, and has shown at the Berry Campbell Gallery (NYC), Paul Thiebaud Gallery (San Francisco), the Bentley Gallery (Phoenix), and Gross McCleaf Gallery (Philadelphia), and HClub, Los Angeles.
Artist Statement
Interest to me as of recent is the investigation of an ambiguous, constructed, and animated space that utilizes open, abstracted imagery in order to bypass or delay immediate recognition and access a state of suspended wonder. Central to this is the creation of painting as palimpsest through process, negation, and reinterpretation in the service of exploring the tension between the explicable and in-explicable, whether it be celestial, spiritual, the natural world, or other. By injecting subtexts through formal elements such as pressure, design, asymmetrical balance and a juxtaposition of painting languages, I hope to disrupt the viewer from a set perspective, allowing them to drift on the double edge sword of wonder.
This body of work has grown out of a desire to explore the confrontation of something far outside one’s normal experience and how this is embodied: the enormity, fluidity, chaos, stillness, and incomprehensibility of such a moment…what is experienced within, as well as the periphery.
As I continue to explore this concept, the work shifts between iconographic, ambiguous and referential objects and a landscape driven narrative that presents a more fantastical and constructed sense of place.
Natania Rosenfeld:
Natania Rosenfeld, the author of the poems that accompany the Ebon Flow series, is a Professor of English at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. Her work—poems, essays and fiction—has appeared and is forthcoming in numerous journals including The American Poetry Review, Raritan, Gettysburg Review, Southwest Quarterly, and Seneca Review. Natania’s poetry manuscript has been a finalist in several contests, and she has won an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award in 2007 for her prose poem “Bodies.” Her essay “Life and Death” was listed as Notable in the Best American Essays of 2011. She is also the author of a critical book on Virginia and Leonard Woolf (Princeton University Press, 2000).
nrosenfe@knox.edu