Jennifer Greenburg

Jennifer Greenburg has been taking this pandemic as opportunity to push her work. What else for an artist to do? We saw some of her recent reflections, images claimed-back through the frame of circumstance, emerge in our spring show A Substitute World. Our patrons have seen her evolve steadily through the years. When she was introduced to us, Jennifer Greenburg was working from a documentary tradition. The approach theoretically comes from a desire to reflect a sense of truthfulness. An ironic path for Greenburg’s subject at the time, The Rockabillies, a subculture that exists in a constructed reality. No wonder, then, that Greenburg came to reject the premise of documentary work. An image can never be displaced from its role of referent or loose the burden of vantage to reflect a non-bias, she now reasons. Counterpoint to this work emerged Revising History. This ongoing work is a deeper and more nuanced study on the role of aesthetics in culture. As Greenburg produces the labor-intensive and time consuming Revising History images (where she replaces a figure in a found vintage vernacular image with a full-body portrait of herself “playing them”) Greenburg is left with “fragments of down-time while working.”

Greenburg is more than another entry in what she called a “laundry-list of artists with unusual hobbies,” in our recent interview, she is a tireless creative. Her history and evolution mark her ability to reassess accepted practice, even for herself.

The works here included let us sneak a view into her mind and practice. We now see the clippings of fake nails as more than mundane activity made difficult during shut-down, but may consider them here as evidence of Greenburg “shedding her character.” To play the various personages in Revising History requires a lot of physical maintenance. Greenburg must be aware of every aspect and detail of outward appearance, her physique, nails, and hair must always be just so. If not, she will be unable to slip into the place of the characters she plays. Perhaps too, we may see the use of shadow and light as a subtle exercise in heightening or attuning to the sense of drama in the mundane, as many of her works are (otherwise) depictions of moments in someone’s everyday life.

Jennifer Greenburg

I have to do everything myself. 2020
I arranged two-stems and I arranged myself. 2020

Image Information :
30 x 40 in. pigment prints (on 34 x 44 in. paper) | Edition of 2 + 1AP | $3,000