This is the first major survey of Jennifer Bolande’s art, spanning three decades of her work in a wide array of media. Jennifer Bolande Landmarks opens on Wednesday, January 11, 2012, with a reception from 6-8 p.m., and will remain on view in ICA’s second floor gallery through March 11, 2012.
Jennifer Bolande emerged as an artist in the late seventies working first in dance, choreography, and drawing. Then, in the early eighties, advancing the ideas and strategies of the Pictures Generation, she began working with found images, rephotography, appropriation, film, and installation, taking her place among those artists who have helped to redefine photography. She has taken an intuitive approach to creating conceptual works of art in the construction of a coherent visual language.
One of the first artists to consistently explore the materiality of the photograph, Bolande employs photographs as objects and subtly re-materializes photographic concepts through her work. Milk Crown (1987), for example, makes solid Harold Edgerton’s well-known image of a milk droplet frozen in photographic time by recreating it as a three-dimensional ceramic sculpture.
This exhibition takes as its point of departure Cast of Characters, a 1999 photographic collage that collects the central players of Bolande’s image-making as though they were cast members on stage for a curtain call. Central subjects like movies, mountains, speakers, trucks, appliances, and globes—seemingly divergent at first glance—coalesce into elements, themes, and narratives, which recur, build, and dovetail throughout her work.
Jennifer Bolande Landmarks is organized by Curator Nicholas Frank and INOVA, the Institute of Visual Arts in the Peck School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The exhibition is coordinated at ICA by Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner, and is accompanied by the book Landmarks, the first monograph dedicated to Bolande’s art, published by JRP Ringier.
Out of Hollywood: Bennett Simpson on William Leavitt and Kathryn Andrews on HerselfThe Infinite MuseumExcursus II: Tea & ConversationDiscussion: Pictures and PropsConversation & Book Signing: Jennifer BolandeOpening and Walkthrough: Winter 2012
