Jen Blazina's Page

Website

jenblazina.com

College / University

Cranbrook Academy of Art, MFA in Printmaking

Member type

Artist

If you're an artist, what kind of art do you make?

Conceptual, Digital, Installation, Photography, Printmaking, Sculpture

I am...

Jen Blazina resides and has a studio in Philadelphia where she is a working artist exhibiting with solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally.

In 2008, she will have two upcoming solo exhibitions: Radford University, Radford, VA and Gallery Imperato of Baltimore, MD. Jen has recently been awarded two residencies in 2008 at the Frans Masereel Centrum in Belgium and a National Endowment for the Arts Grant to attend a fellowship at The Women’s Studio Workshop.

In 2007, Blazina will have multiple solo exhibitions: Kunstoffice in Berlin, Germany; Project Gallery in Philadelphia, PA; Washington Square Windows, New York University in New York City, NY; Bridge International during Art Chicago, Chicago, IL and Glass Weekend at Wheaton Arts, Millville, NJ, represented by Marx Saunders Gallery of Chicago. She has also been included in a two person exhibition entitled, “Historia, Jen Blazina and Michael Markwick, “ at Pictura in Dordrecht, Netherlands.

She has been awarded numerous residencies including: Women’s Studio Workshop in New York, in 2006; Scuola di Grafica in Venice, Italy; Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA, in 2005 and 2007; The Creative Glass Center of America’s Residency Fellowship for 2003 in New Jersey; Millay Colony for the Arts in New York. She has also been awarded numerous grants including the Leeway Foundation Grant, the Maryland State Arts Council, and the Independence Foundation Grant.

About my artwork

My grandfather was an amateur photographer who documented my family’s history. My grandmother told family stories through using his images as a referral point. The idea of memory has been transformed by what I have been told, viewed, and read.

Appealing to the collective experience of being a member of a family, I create installations. Using photographs, create a pathway into the past presenting us with an untouchable place we can only visit again through memory. Some of the photographs retain evidence of our recollections, becoming a metaphor for the fragmentation of a memory and the desire to recapture those ephemeral moments.

Subsequently new and old stories are intermixed, create a past and present tense voice, and speak to a new generational history-my own.

Objects are a remainder of a defining moment.

While searching for discarded objects from thrift stores, on the street, and ones passed down to me from my family, these become personal keepsakes, icons of the past which otherwise would be overlooked or regarded as something useless. Based on this experience, collections represent a sense of holding onto a place in time. By re-creating these objects through casting and re-fabrication, I have used the history of the objects in my own current tense.

My installations examine commonplace objects and subtle images, which evoke a haunting and ephemeral sense of a familiarity with the past. The photographs and selected objects become iconic themselves and allude to the tangible evidence of the invisible portal to a moment and the temperamental narratives, evoked by both the image, and memory.

Through these installations, I am conserving and preserving past family personal narratives, which then are abstracted into imagery a universal audience can relate to experiences of their own.

The centre of the artworld is

nowhere and everywhere

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http://www.artreview.com/profile/JenBlazina
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