Exhibitions | Jenny Fine

Artist: Jenny Fine | Location: Alabama

Suspending Disbelief

May 18 - August 3, 2019

“Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.” George Bernard Shaw

I create images and environments inspired by the landscapes of my rural southern upbringing and my family’s stories. Through my photography, the family farm and our home’s interiors become a stage where our costumed bodies perform ourselves. The camera crops, flattens space, freezes time, and silences indications of life – so then, is the photograph a kind of death? What does it mean, then, to regenerate an image or wear it as a costume? My work is grounded in early (Victorian) sentiment around the photograph – when it was better to have an image of your dead child than no image at all. This is the starting point for the ‘stand-in’, the photograph as both presence and absence. My current work approaches photography in this context to explore our relationship to history. The resulting images are a surreal collision of past and present, blending fantasy and reality. Photographs, performances, and installations investigate place, the persistence of time, and the complex identity of my American South. My work attempts to overlap past and present by incorporating storytelling and regional cultural studies, creating a latent sensory experience that lives on in the mind of the viewer.

Note: This exhibition finished hanging on August 3, 2019.


Jenny Fine

Alabama

Jenny Fine (b. 1981, Enterprise, AL) is a visual artist and art professor currently living and working in Alabama. Rooted in the photographic form, Fine’s practice employs time as material in an exploration of both personal and cultural memory, identity, and our shifting relationship to the photograph in our digital, image-saturated age. Fine received a BFA from the University of Alabama in 2006 and an MFA from The Ohio State University in 2010. Fine was awarded a National Windgate Fellowship from the Center for Craft, Creativity and Design (2006); a Fergus Memorial Scholarship from The Ohio State University (2009); was selected by the Greater Columbus Arts Council, Columbus, Ohio for an artist residency in Dresden, Germany (2012). In 2017, Alabama State Council on the Arts awarded Fine with an Individual Artist Fellowship. Fine has shown her work in solo exhibitions at Geh8, Dresden, Germany (2012), Dublin Arts Council, Dublin, Ohio (2014); The Sculpture Center, Cleveland, Ohio (2015), Children’s Museum of the Arts, New York, New York (2015); Wiregrass Museum of Art, Dothan, Alabama (2015); and Stephen Smith Fine Art, Fairfield, AL (2016). She exhibits her work in group shows throughout the United States including exhibitions at the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio (2012); The Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, Ohio (2015); Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL (2015); and Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, AL (2017/2018). Fine currently teaches in the Fine Arts Division at Enterprise State Community College in Enterprise, Ala. and as an Adjunct Professor of Interdisciplinary Studios and Foundations in the Department of Art and Art History at The University of Alabama at Birmingham.

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