Amy Jenkins

The projected image of blood-clouded water fills a miniature tub into which a woman climbs, crossing the static bounds of space and object. Slowly, one begins to notice the blood recede into her body, the water clearing. Bleeding every month is a defining female experience, yet “Ebb” is a rite of purification in reverse. She gathers up her womanhood and climbs out of the tub, fortified by the transfusion.

Link to view video on artist’s website:
http://www.amyjenkins.net/videos/ebb.html

“Shelter for Daydreaming” is a two-channel video which invokes the netherworld of “In-Betweeness.” Projected 8 x 11 feet onto a suspended, “floating” wall centered within the gallery, one side of the wall shows a small house seemingly suspended in an aqueous region which is without gravity, yet is somehow tethered to the movement of the underside of waves. Occasionally, a wave will lift from the base of the house, revealing its underside. In this momentary flash are trees and a landscape pointing downwards, becoming the roots that temporarily stabilize and give location and mass to the house. As quickly as this under/aboveworld appears, it is obscured by the resettling of the wave and the viewer is returned to the isolated, aqueous void into which the house is slowly being pulled.

The second channel of “Shelter for Daydreaming” is projected onto the opposite side of the floating wall in the center of the gallery. This large-scale projection shows the interior of an empty house. The view focuses on two rooms, separated by a central wall; the interior sways back and forth as if contained within a boat. The fluid movement can be mesmerizing and meditative, yet also unstable and precarious. The large-scale projections both contain fluid, rocking motions that can physically affect the viewer’s equilibrium.

“Shelter for Daydreaming” summons a feeling of being on a voyage through water and air with no destination named. As if in a daydream, the fluid movement of the video is mesmerizing and meditative, yet also unstable and precarious. There is a sense of searching and isolation, the desire to find a home. Addressing the notions of interior and exterior, above and below, “Shelter for Daydreaming” invokes the netherworld of “In-Betweeness:” To be without origin, floating somewhere between the solid and the fluid, somewhat awake, yet far away from an actual place.

Link to view video on artist’s website:
http://www.amyjenkins.net/videos/shelter.html

Edition One of Two, is in the permanent collection of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.

“Shelter for Daydreaming” was made possible in part with funds and in-kind support from: The New York State Council on the Arts, The Jerome Foundation, The Experimental Television Center, Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center, and the MacDowell Colony.

“Tug” is a 3-channel video installation symbolizing the tension and harmony within parenthood. A couple struggles at tug-of-war in a life-sized, diptych projection; between them is a wall-mounted monitor showing a toddler whose movements and emotions correspond to the rope pulled between the parents. What begins as a game, teeters in back and forth sparring, and turns to an all-out struggle to hold onto one’s rope-end.

Link to view video on artist’s website:
http://www.amyjenkins.net/videos/tug.html

“The Audrey Samsara” is a meditative, slowly unfolding film 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. Intimate and edgy, it captures the truth of the nursing experience. “The Audrey Samsara” is a self-portrait of mother and daughter at it’s most minimal and essential: the irrevocable need for nourishment and rest.

Ironically, in May 2004, “The Audrey Samsara” was censored from its first scheduled public exhibition at the New York 5th Avenue gallery of designer Salvatore Ferragamo, when a company executive found the artwork “distasteful.” Articles have been written about the artwork in Art Papers, the National Coalition Against Censorship newsletter, The NY Daily News, The Boston Globe, among others.

Link to view video on artist’s website:
http://www.amyjenkins.net/videos/Audrey%20Samsara.html

Large-scale photographs, produced separately from the video, are also a part of The Audrey Samsara series. Link to view photographs:
http://www.amyjenkins.net/photography/cradle.html

Exhibitions of “The Audrey Samsara” include:

2010: Athens Institute for Contemporary Art, Athens, Georgia;

2009: The Intimate Line, Sepia International Inc., New York, NY;

2009: Boob Tube, screening presented by Aurora Picture Show at Caroline Collective, Houston, Texas;

2006: Haifa Museum of Art, Haifa, Israel;

2005: Brattleboro Museum, Brattleboro, Vermont;

2005: Kustera Tilton Gallery, New York, New York;

2004: Samson Projects, Boston, Massachusetts

In “From the Same Water,” a miniature pool stands in the center of the darkened room; rear-projected inside the miniature pool a male figure, floating face up, slowly sinks underwater and is obscured. When the figure reappears, it is a female who floats to the surface. The floating and sinking repeats in slow, meditative motion, accompanied by the sound of water, exhaling breath, and cicadas.

The alternating figure brings to mind the relationship between male and female, brother and sister, as well as the intimation of both genders being contained within one body. The title “From the Same Water” refers to amniotic fluid as well as to the passages of birth and death. The tie of male and female is broken when the male figure submerges and does not reappear. Flesh becomes water, akin to spirit.

The artist and her brother, Craig Jenkins, appear in the video. “From the Same Water” is dedicated to Craig Jenkins, who recently died of cancer.

Link to view video on artist’s website:
http://www.amyjenkins.net/videos/From%20the%20Same%20Water.html

A small 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 slowly falls from the nipple and obscures the view of the breast. Tenderly the droplet is wiped away, as if “cleaning up” the viewer who has just been “dripped on.”

“Bedroom Waltz,” a work-in-progress, is an animation of a bed slowly spinning to the music box tune “Honeymoon Waltz” as it unmakes itself down to bare bedposts. One by one, discarded possessions begin to rain down onto the bed. A chair, a crib, clothing, holiday decorations and random keepsakes—the stuff of attics—build on the bed into a precarious mound. From the possibility of romance to the inevitable accumulation of domestic excesses, the bed and its plethora signify the history of living.

“Bedroom Waltz” will be wall-projected the scale of an actual bed, in high-definition. The animation will evolve over several hours.