October 27 — November 23, 1988
Beaver College Art Gallery
The Beaver College Art Gallery is pleased to present mixed media work by New York artist Jennifer Bolande from October 27 to November 23. The exhibition will open on Wednesday, October 26, with a reception from 7:00-9:00 PM in honor of the artist. Members of the press are cordially invited to attend the reception and also to meet with the gallery’s new director, Paula Marincola.
The artist also will give an informal lecture about her work on Wednesday, November 2 at 4:00 PM in the Little Theatre located on campus. Admission is free.
Installation view, “Jennifer Bolande,” Beaver College Art Gallery
Bolande’s highly detailed, multi-keyed works exist in the intriguing space between photography and sculpture. “She has recently emerged as one of the most compelling younger artists working today,” notes Marincola who organized the exhibition. “Her work has generated a great deal of critical and curatorial interest. Our art gallery is the first institution to assemble an overview of her production since the early 1980s.”
Bolande’s assemblages are constructed from fragmented photographic images and objects that occupy the often overlooked periphery of contemporary society – refrigerators, amplifiers, sandwich boards, faux logs, and scraps of other kinds of cast-off materials such as carpeting, bubble wrap and wooden shims. The sculptures’ reticent and idiosyncratic character demands the viewer’s close attention as it is based upon an invented syntax derived from the margins or our media culture’s landscape.
Installation view, “Jennifer Bolande,” Beaver College Art Gallery
Critic Ronald Jones has written that Bolande’s art “…reactivates our desire to interpret beyond the bounds of the predetermined. There is a private iconography. Yet she is always careful to convey, often literally, the invitation to see in her art. In this artist’s hands, unexpected juxtapositions and conjunctions touch off a series of possible meanings at once poetic and humorous.”
Bolande, currently represented by Metro Pictures, New York, attended Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She has had one-person exhibitions at The Kitchen, Nature Morte, and Metro Pictures, all located in New York and at the Robbin Lockett Gallery in Chicago. Bolande also has shown internationally in group exhibitions in St. Louis, Buffalo, Aspen, Chicago, Vienna, Milan, Antwerp, Geneva, Dusseldorf, and Amsterdam among others. Her work also has been recently reviewed in Art in America, Flash Art, and Artscribe magazines.
