Valerie Jenkins
Region: Midwest
City / State: Detroit, MI
This body of work began with my prolonged observation and
study of clear glass objects stacked and suspended in a window
greenhouse that is attached to my studio and home. What
emerged from my engagement with this “still life” was the
opportunity to examine the precarious relationship between
seeing and knowing.
Moving between painting, digital photography, and drawing,
the resulting work is a hybrid form that suggests simultaneous
realities, where appearances are fundamentally unstable and
relational, and where reality is vulnerable to distortion both from
within and without.
I’m interested in creating a visual dynamic that echoes life in the
contemporary world, particularly how both the corporeal and the
virtual contribute to our collective experience. The work functions
as a trace of everyday experience, where such concerns as
distance and proximity, ambiguity and contradiction, matter and
its negation, are infused with imagination and wonder.