July 3 – August 31, 2020
The photographs in the gallery exhibition A Substitute World by Jennifer Greenburg were culled from over 15 years of her personal archive. These images have haunted her from the moment they were made – the weight of these spaces inspired the uncanny necessity to make the image. Today, these contemporary works feel eerily relevant devices to experiencing the impermissible.
As an artist whose typical practice involves elaborate image construction, Greenburg recognizes indulging in the compulsion of image making does nothing to advance the media. However, she also acknowledges the feeling is only satiated by the act, and sometimes time sharpens relevance.
We have arrived. In this time of quarantine there is much about this work that feels sensical. They are solitary and still. We feel at once alone with ourselves and knowingly connected to the world. As always, aesthetics plays a role in the artist’s work. The images capture an undeniable beauty: they are formally well-framed and have lush palate. The scale of the works pushes their monumentality and reveal their true façade. They exaggerate and satiate our desire to indulge in fresh experiences, yet we know images are not real, rather proxy. Deeper reads reveal further nuance: subtle jabs at un/acceptable societal and photo-conventions surface.
Greenburg’s exhibition images are splendid, grand, painterly depictions of social places- interiors and exteriors. Courtyards, pools decks, hotels, public baths. That these places are somewhat taboo these days is not the only reason the works lace with a dis-belonging tension. Greenburg feels guilty in a way for creating these contemporary photographs; on one hand they are superficially indulgent and trite yet could not and would not have been made by anyone, and are not, in her estimate, generally accepted to be made by just anyone.
The artist, having now rejected documentary work, has dedicated over 10 years to studying the role vernacular images and raw aesthetics have in establishing cultural norms; her sensitivity to these underpinnings is acute. The truth explored and exposed by Greenburg’s other gallery exhibition Revising History is that there are deep (possibly) subconscious frameworks embedded in all of our personal images, and that aesthetics easily mask oppression. Our proliferation of harmonizing “type” images proves our own participation in and celebration of social-cultural expectations fitting the prevailing white-male perspective. These new fine art works play into and counteract these same themes.
Solitude in these works speaks to the maker as much as the frame, collectively, working against cultural subtext that instructs that women are of two types, and that the respectable sort should be guarded, reserved, quiet. Women may be alone in the home only. Women may not travel, eat, or go to “strange” places or anywhere “public” alone. Danger may be lurking, and she should remain fearful of what others could do to her.
Greenburg cannot help remarking that society and mainstream art history desire and canonize women who expose themselves intimately and explicitly before the camera (interior/nude/family/relationships/peep show). This feels more dangerous, invasive, and permanent to Greenburg than wandering down the proverbial lonely alley at night. Hers are a play on the sort of images either a male artist in her footsteps has or could be celebrated for or that otherwise speak back to societal “supposed not to-s.” Greenburg leans on the arguments of Susan Sontag: photographs “support [the] maker’s own notions,” and can “lay claim to” or “help build a nascent” reality. (For expanded citations, see press release.)
Photographs in A Substitute World do not only transport us, allowing us to engage the sort of places we may not physically engage for some time, they more importantly embrace a future visual substructure without implied gender hierarchies and boundaries. In keeping with her greater practice, this gallery exhibition calls for reassessment of our belief in the image’s ability to embody reality, asks for more rigorous evaluation of the substructure of visual idealism, and implores us to enact a new visual order.
About the Artist: Jennifer Greenburg holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MFA from the University of Chicago. In her most well-recognized work, Revising History, Greenburg uses a multi-disciplinary performative process whereby she replaces the figure in a found vernacular image (late 1920’s – late 1960’s) with herself.