About Jennifer B. Thoreson

Contemporary artist Jennifer B. Thoreson’s work is fantastic in quality and honest in sentiment. Thoreson’s photographs first inspire our curiosity. Images are strange, surreal, yet physically and emotionally believable. Thoreson’s spiritual upbringing is evident in works that engage themes of redemption and recovery, renewal and heeling, resilience and trust. Thoreson pulls from her own life and memories, often patterning the scenes she builds on personal experiences or intimate encounters. The scenes in her photographs are not rendered digitally, rather intricately and laboriously constructed. Thoreson creates elaborate installations that are stage for her photographs.

Manus by Jennifer B. Thoreson

In 2021 contemporary artist Jennifer B. Thoreson invited prayers for a stranger to lend physicality to a universal yet invisible act. Manus has been made possible through public contributions to The Prayer Glove Project (jdc Fine Art was a portal for participation April 2022).

Thoreson began work by asking people of all faiths and beliefs to contribute to sit with a pair of cotton gloves, wear them, and mark them with red ink as they form a prayer or affirmation for a single recipient--Caspian, a five-year-old boy living in New Mexico who suffers from severe seizures. Like a moving meditation, the mark making process allows spoken words and rituals to become evidenced.

In response to the call of The Prayer Glove Project Thoreson received by mail nearly 2000 gloves from people in 11 countries from many faiths. The artist then dyed the marked gloves using Indian Madder Root pigments, shaped them over wooden molds and cast them so they might have varied gesture and lifelike dimensional form.

Upon installation, Thoreson suspended the gloves together with hundreds of hand-made brass shepherd’s bells which moved and rang with gentle breezes from windows nearby. The floor is covered in white volcanic ash collected from the mountains of Okeh-Owingeh Pueblo, New Mexico. Beneath the gloves is a child-sized bed covered in a woven blanket marked with a hand-inked pattern representing the star of Bethlehem.

The initial installation here shown was a private viewing for Caspian and his family. Photographs, a video and a reinstallation of the project will be presented in its entirety for the public in 2024.

Flora & The Medic by Jennifer B. Thoreson

The inspiration for Thoreson’s Flora series was seeded by a trip to Alcatraz. Towering concrete, heavy bars, and confining spaces give way to the prisoner’s gardens. The distinction between confinement and growth is as heightened as it is intertwined in Flora. The figures are bound by facets, wire, even their own blooms, and weather they are fixed or affixed recall icons. The women embody beauty, represent strength, and empower renewal. The modern art speaks to our own desire to tend and to heal.

The Medic photography series by Thoreson followed this early work, and goes further, engaging some of life’s most intimate moments and universal aspirations. Illness, pain, and mortality are combated by the desire to preserve the body and spirit. The ill and the heeler share an unbreakable bond: immeasurable love. Hope swells in stark frames where figures are surrounded by peculiar contraptions that are both archaic and futuristic. We are struck by our own belief in the impossible machines. Through our desire to believe in the possibility of these machines, Thoreson causes us to discover the extent of our own compassion.

Testament by Jennifer B. Thoreson

In Testament, Thoreson revisits themes of human fragility, pain, and eventually, recovery. The contemporary artist is attracted to the subject of vulnerability and is compelled by moments where people are on the edge, barely laced together, befriending disaster, remembering something, or exposing something. It is these moments she reconstructs to understand how relationships survive, why they dissolve, how people love one one another, and how such emotions express. These works were made in a home Thoreson rented over a year. The artist enshrined the space, transforming it into a sanctuary, where the scenes were built and the photographs made. Sculptural objects in these images use such materials as wool, linen, clay, human hair, and beeswax.

Jennifer B. Thoreson earned her Master of Fine Arts from the University of New Mexico after graduated magna cum laude from the University of Texas at Arlington with a BFA. She has been awarded a Howard Franks Memorial Scholarship (2013), Critical Mass Book Award (2011) and WPPI International Photographer of the Year (2009).