Jennifer Bolande
Reprise: Plywood Curtains and Visible Distance
December 1, 2020 - January 30, 2021
For the final exhibition of 2020 Jennifer Bolande transforms the entirety of The Green Gallery into a vista and facade viewable only from the outside. The installation revisits and recombines elements from two of Bolande’s earlier works, Plywood Curtains and Visible Distance. With uncertainty the defining feature of this moment, the plywood curtains invite us to see the present not as final but the start of something new:
“Visible Distance was a site specific work I made in the Coachella Valley for Desert X 2017 that placed photographs of mountains on billboards against and in alignment with the same mountains visible in the distance. Plywood Curtains was a public project developed in response to the recession of 2008. Sheets of plywood were photographed, printed on fabric, made into curtains and set in vacant storefronts throughout LA. The curtains invite a double-take; something solid has become pliable and mobile. At the time I imagined that if my Plywood Curtains were put into every empty storefront in the city, it would bring visibility and a commensurate sense of scale to the recession, as well as a sense of possibility.
Now in 2020 we have a reprise — one which has dwarfed the recession of 2008. There are mountains of statistics and of mountain charts showing precipitous peaks of unemployment, of closures, and death; plunging valleys of jobs and the economy. Planning for the future is not yet possible; beyond us. The visible distance is temporarily obstructed but coming into view.”
—JB
The work is available to view 24/7 from outside of the gallery through January 16, 2021. In addition to the installation, the Plywood Curtains are available in 4x8 foot sections or by the yard. Also available but not on view are a set of photographs which document the original Visible Distance installation. For inquiries about the work please contact the gallery.
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Currently based in California, Bolande came of age in the late seventies and was noted early on for her works exploring the materiality of photographs. She uses various strategies and media including photography, film, sculpture, and installation to explore affinities between unlikely elements and to convey embodied experience. For more than 30 years, Bolande has built a lexicon of recurring elements, which she recombines to generate new meanings as they pass from one context or material to another. Her work is sited what is changing, illusory or disappearing, and calls into question distinctions between image, event and object, the real and the imaginary.
In 2010, a thirty-year survey of Bolande’s work was presented at INOVA in Milwaukee, WI, and travelled to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA and the Luckman Gallery at California State University, Los Angeles, CA. Her site-specific project, Visible Distance/Second Sight, was featured in the inaugural Desert X 2017 in Coachella Valley, CA. The project Plywood Curtains was seen in storefront windows throughout Los Angeles in 2009-10. Solo exhibitions of her work have appeared at institutions and galleries around the world such as Magenta Plains Gallery, New York, NY; Kunstraum, Munich, DE; MoMA PS1, Kunsthalle Palazzo, Liestal, CH; Margo Leavin, Los Angeles, CA; Metro Pictures, NY; among others. Her work was recently included in museum exhibitions including After the Plaster Foundation or Where Can We Live? Queens Museum, NY; Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; Mixed Use Manhattan, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid. She is professor of New Genres in the Department of Art at UCLA.
Please contact the Green Gallery at info@thegreengallery.biz to schedule an appointment.