Statement.

I began doing the work exhibited here as a teenager growing up in rural Illinois, largely as a means to create an imaginary folklore about my extended family. The work was based on old family photos, writing and collected images.

My technique is to take an image, focus on what action it portrays or suggests to me, and extend or exaggerate this motion through manipulation or painting. Often I portray imagined activities or actions that cannot be played out in reality, such as in "Born Weeping Constant Love," where a figure is catching handfuls of her own tears.

Written messages have always been an important aspect of my work. I use borrowed verse, automatic writing, mirrored or backward script. While my style of writing is intentionally cryptic, most messages can be read with the effort of the viewer. I incorporate Arabic calligraphy to offer something that is both beautiful and alien to me. Its something that I treat on one level as pure decoration and as surreptitious messenger on another.

From my point of view, these works are highly embellished, devotional pieces. I treat the subject matter as an event or individual to be memorialized. Often I work from the point of view of a third person and incorporate a voice that is not my own to show the work as the result of what someone else went through. I also permit myself to include messages within the work that I could not communicate otherwise. These collages provide a context for me to both disguise and reveal feelings based on reality or imagination.

[Statement Copyright 1999, Jenny Hart.]

Biograph.

Jenny Hart currently resides in Austin, Texas, where she works as a preparator for the department of prints and drawings at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas.

She is also the bassist for the Austin-based band The Playthings, and can be seen tooling around town in her brick-patterned Volvo.

Jenny Hart is represented by The Jayne Gallery in Kansas City, Missouri. E-mail them at amjkc@jaynegallery.com.

Jenny Hart can be reached via E-mail at viciouscargo@yahoo.com.