Golda, 2023
Debut: NEW Constructed Portraits by Jennifer Greenburg
An online presentation of new works from an ongoing series.
In Constructed Portraits Jennifer Greenburg sculpts new representations of female-presenting bodies with photographic material, technology, and the labor of her own hand. Layers of work, selection, intervention, and processing are involved to bring the work from source to pigment print.
Our acceptance of photographs as truths has had insidious consequences–especially on standards of female beauty. It is my hope this work will call attention to this problem rather than to create a hysteria on the way technology is changing the way we make art. -Jennifer Greenburg
In Constructed Portraits, Jennifer Greenburg uses hybridized methods to explore how aesthetics operate in society. She uses old and new strategies to sculpt female-presenting figures that are neither human nor machine but appear to possess an awareness they are being immortalized through the act of image-making process. In keeping with her practice, Greenburg draws on images from an archive of vintage vernaculars. Part of the multi-step process employed by the artist is interfacing with AI. Hundreds of exchanges follow initial instruction to “make her more beautiful.” Greenburg is experimenting with what this expanded form of portraiture might reveal about our own desires, insecurities, and coded facades.
Yuval, 2023
The human and AI have learned visual language through the same assorted sources: high art, personal, and functional imagery. We recognize glimmers of armatures and anchors- traditional poses, descriptive qualities of drawing, painting, assemblage, collage as well as 3D sensibilities. Visual strategies draw from the well of art history, advertising, photojournalism, and personal archives.
Jennifer Greenburg’s Constructed Portraits draw-out our mortal anxieties. This new technology is delivering what it believes we want. In Constructed Portraits, this involves AI reading an image, and responding with what it has been told defines beauty. Greenburg’s figures invite gaze through their gestures. We feel allured yet uncomfortable by images that compress and expand visual dialectic like an accordion. This experience causes a tension that is between desire and fear. The rules for representation are muddled. The figures lean androgynous. Lines that should connect do not. Blacks are rich and inky, whites are bright and void. Space is simplified, the figure dominant and possesses a sexual energy that is hard to ignore. Strange decisions, sometimes violent truncations, and integrations are made between figure and space or furniture. Dimension is both flat and suggested; the figure is soft yet over-textured.
Like any successful series Constructed Portraits reflects the age in which we live. Earlier this year we shared Greenburg’s Constructed Portraits in context with her other bodies of work. The two latest works we debut here for the first time, Golda and Yuval are in response to the visual lexicon of the moment. As example, Golda seems to be holding a dagger with an arm that is missing. Jennifer Greenburg’s works raise questions around how images embed aesthetic cues that proof cultural normalcy, sharpening the point of the artist’s study.
Jennifer Greenburg | Constructed Portraits
Project Price Structure:
35 x 35 in. archival pigment prints | Edition of 2 | from $12,500
The Constructed Portraits series is ongoing; earlier portraits below. Find more on the artist’s page. Greenburg dedicates a decade or more to each of her projects. Learn about other works, past and ongoing. Follow the evolution.
