We All Share: Jen Clay
On view May 4th – 27th, 2018Opening Reception: First Friday, May 4th 6pm – 10pm
Jen Clay is native to the foothills of North Carolina and is currently based in South Florida. Clay works as a multimedia artist which includes performance and video works and installations. She received her Masters in Fine Arts in sculpture from the University of Florida while also studying costume design and behavior analysis.
Jen recently sat down with us for a Q&A about here current exhibition, here is a transcript from our conversation:
Q: Tell me about yourself and your experience?A: I am an artist living in South Florida in Fort Lauderdale. I work in textiles and video making which includes stop motion animation. I usually create performances, installations and videos that combine the two.I had a really great time in Philly, it was my first time in the city and a exhibit is great excuse to visit. It was a cushy install with Jerry from Practice helping me install. I felt really welcomed and comfortable. I loved meeting the visitors and talking about sci-fi movies and sewing and the local gossip.Q: How/when did you start making art?A: Really having my daughter at the age of nineteen made me motivated to go to college and to get my MFA. I wanted to be a example to her to be serious about our dreams and to do work that brings you happiness and excitement. I wasn’t making serious work until my second year of my undergrad degree.I’ve always had a bias toward sculpture and loved to build things out of the red clay in my backyard in North Carolina as kid. I had a speech impediment and really poor writing and reading skills so to make friends I would do skit performances and make things like wire figures. That was the only way I felt like I could communicate and be understood as a kid and I still feel that making works is the best way I can communicate a feeling to a viewer.Q: What has been a seminal experience for you?A: Watching Tales From The Crypt as kid was the first time I felt ambivalence of repulsion and attraction and that aesthetic influences my work.Q: Where are you finding ideas for your work these days?A: All of my work is connected through a experience of being comforted by the unknown so I research actual supernatural sightings like alien and ghost stories . I also research depictions of otherness through the horror and sci-fi genre. I am interested in manifestations of fears and anxieties of mass populations and how horror and sci-fi movies and tv shows allow for a safe experience to work through those anxieties like for example body horror movies taking place in response to the AIDS epidemic in the 80’s .Q: How did this project develop?A: I feel that a lot of artists are working on address extinction, I feel like fear for the future both political and climate change are a more common fore thought in society. Where I live is a sub-tropical climate and with the climate changing more diseases are a concern. I started researching how our doom is predicted to take place in hotter climates. Like in this article, “If you live in Florida, doctors say climate change is already affecting your health” by the Miami Herald. We have Zika risk with booming mosquito population and the occasional flesh-eating bacteria warning for the ocean.I already feel like a porous sponge for disease and bacteria and have some rational and irrational fears for a outcome of an epidemic for a new disease created in the hot sticky swamp of south Florida. I decided to pull from The Blob sci- fi movie and explore my fears and anxieties by making a doomsday sentient disease creature that talks to the audience about how it’s going to be better once they join the creature with sinister double entendres.So the I worked through my idea for this project during Hurricane Irma while I was in my apartment with family in Fort Lauderdale and watching the winds from the window. I decided to include the sounds of the hurricane in the installation.Q: After reading more about you and your personal background, it’s clear that your past really shows itself in your work. Can you speak more on how your childhood, or any prior life experiences, play into your body of work and this project specifically?A: I am influenced by my childhood hallucinations. A “is this real or am I crazy” scenario as a child made me aware of my perception and gave me a distrust for my own mind as a child. In return I long for the unexpected in the mundane. In a lot of ways I am just trying to recreate that scenario for my viewers.Q: Collective human memory and certainty seem to be a running theme through work, can you comment on how that theme is relayed to the viewer in this installation?A: It’s really more like collective uncertainty is what I like to explore. This piece was based on the 2017 American Psychological Association report “Stress in America™: Coping with Change”. This report measured the collective stress over police violence toward minorities, mass shootings, decreased health care, economics and climate change. The piece playfully explores that “we all share” uncertainty for the future.Q: Why installation art? What does this medium offer you?A: Installation work for me is tied to creating a moment of an alternate reality that a viewer can walk into. A installation can be like a big bag that a artist can stuff in everything that they love like video, drawing, sculpture, performance and sound.Q: Working as a multidisciplinary artist, is there a medium that you enjoy the most?A: I love the intimate experience of a live performance and even when I am not creating a performance, I try to create a performance- like experience. I really love dialog of speaking directly to the viewer so I include that in installations, artist books and video.Q: How would you describe your creative process? Fear and anxiety are pretty apparent topics in your work. Would you say that they fuel your process?A: I have a binder that I keep lay out of ideas for projects along with notes and related topics. I am making this narrative universe where all of my work exists. I am always adding to this binder. I don’t think my idea process is any different than anyone else, I just get idea that pops into my idea sort of like a highschool crush you can’t stop thinking about and then I add it to my binder and it gets in line of the things I want to make. Sometimes I think I am just making things that will entertain myself and friends. With of my work I am trying to make a playful experience to explore fear and anxiety.What really fuels my process is doing my personal best to create something that will haunt the viewer for years like a performance or work that they can never quite pinpoint the feeling that it sprouted in them. I love ambivalence and ambiguity which I know is vague but when that specific vagueness this is unsettling because it is unknown and creates new curiosity in the viewer.Q: Walking into this installation, I found myself surrounded by contradictions and juxtapositions; it’s inviting and jarring, confusing and familiar. Was presenting an range of contradictions a conscious choice when fleshing out this project ? If so, what do you think that tool offers ‘We All Share’?A: I love contradictions. I think we mostly live in a grey area. The title is meant to address the one thing “we all share” which is uncertainty for the future.I love subversion of the familiar and contradictory feelings to create ambivalence which can create a uncanny experience.Q: Hues of red and pink are very much present not only in this work, but often occur in your past works. For you, what do these colors represent or communicate?A: Most of the time it is a choice of what materials are free or inexpensive. I do tend to be bias toward pink and red though because of the relation to body horror and gore.Q: Can you tell me about how you created the soundscapes that are paired with your video?A: It is made up of wax clay. I use a table mount and shoot from overhead and use Dragonframe software to onion skin each photos and then I use Final Cut to edit video and sound. I gather sound using a handheld mic.Q: When experiencing your installation, the one line that really stood out to me was “change is good.” Do you think that change is necessary?It is more like satire with a doomsday disease creature telling the audience that “change is good”. The creature is the change and as a result we are dead or atleast no longer us. The audio is meant to be seemingly friendly but have sinister intent like salesman trying to sell you something that will ruin your credit or the white van candy danger-stranger unfortunate scenario for kids.
Exhibition Statement:
A shared uncertainty for the future is manifested as a narrative installation about literal extinction. We All Share includes an inflatable sculpture, projected videos and soundscape. The inflatable is a doomsday inhuman creature that speaks to the viewer. The growth of the creature and inevitable extinction it will cause is shown through the video work. The video projection which includes claymation and captured footage.This work is influenced by:-1988 movie The Blob- experiencing Hurricane Irma in Fort Lauderdale FL-American Psychological Association report Stress in America™: Coping with Change,-Fatberg, a congealed mass found in sewer systems all over the world and is formed by the combination of non-biodegradable solid matter such as wet wipes, grease, cooking fat and condoms.-The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) disheartening changed language from preventing climate change to adapting to climate change.