JANUS

Artist: Jen P. Harris

Feb. 29 - Apr. 4, 2020

Harris restructures and repurposes her own praxis, creating an idiosyncratic space of rupture and movement, allowing the viewer to discern fragments of descriptive imagery in the individual elements that make up the artworks in this exhibition. Each representational trace originates in the archives of her earlier paintings, which recombine botanical illustrations, medieval tarot cards, colonial-era maps and other images from Western knowledge systems to surface the heteronormative patriarchal narratives that underly culture. Harris’ cut-ups, similar to Dadaist theory, oppose harmony and make use of improvisation to learn from spontaneity.

In Harris’ own words:

Struggling to find a way forward after the election of Donald Trump, I stopped painting and started cutting up five years’ worth of my own work in an attempt to uncover appropriate modes of representation for this troubling new paradigm... Janus Space is an ongoing project. I will continue this exploration until my flat files are empty.

Curated by Curator Love (Erika Hirugami, MAAB)