testament statements . jennifer b. thoreson

from AINAS N°16 . 3/2022

il mago dei simboli . jurij jakovenko

testament statements

JENNIFER B. THORESON

Testament is a collection of twelve intricately staged photographs. Through sculpture, installation, and representational human subjects, I am exploring the spiritual labor of bearing weight, submission, futileness, and persistence.

To create the work, I sought out a house that reminded me of my childhood home, rented the house for one year, and transformed it into a freighted sanctuary for constructing photographs.

I fabricated sculptural objects for each image, using materials such as wool, linen, clay, human hair, and beeswax. The materials borrow symbolic language from the Bible, and create alter-like, fleshy masses. I imagine the house as a gateway, the silent space just before crossing over. The

INSEPARABLE (DETAIL) Jennifer B. Thoreson fotografia . performance, 2010-2017 LITTLE BABY Jennifer B. Thoreson fotografia . performance, 2010-2017 CANCER Jennifer B. Thoreson fotografia . performance, 2010-2017

people in the photographs are in the final phase of bearing weight, moments away from finally laying it down. I am seeking the moment of relief, and relishing in the moments just before it occurs.

In my work, I revisit themes of human fragility, pain, and eventually, recovery. I am attracted to vulnerability, to peeling back a skin that reveals something precious, dark, and insistently tender. I am compelled by the moments where people are on an edge, barely laced together, befriending disaster, remembering something, or exposing something.

I am curious about how relationships survive, why they dissolve, how people love one another, and how such love is expressed. In this work, I am investigating heavy burdens and how we carry them. I am interested in the spiritual labor of bearing weight, submission, futility, and persistence.

To create the work, I rented an empty house for a year, and transformed it into a makeshift sanctuary, a freighted space for constructing photographs. I chose the house because it was sentimental, and felt very much like my 1980’s family home. It had a wornin, gentle quality, and I felt connected to it the moment I walked through the door. In the photographs, each room is meticulously styled with textiles, objects, and colors, and patterns that I remember from my childhood.

In this exhibition, each room includes photographs, textile works, and sculptural objects. These pieces reference specific moments of understanding and awareness in my personal spiritual journey. If you look carefully, you will see each stage of a sheep’s wool, and it’s evolution from the animal’s dirty fleece to finished woven cloth. Wool is shorn, picked, washed, carded, spun into yarn, dyed, and finally woven into a functional woven or felted textile.

I like to know and feel the moment where people fall apart, and saturate my work in it. I want to push at a breaking point, and hold out hope for restoration. These photographs are representations of quiet, ultra-still moments of raw humanness; the phase just after a laboring, aching fall and at the point when renewal inevitably begins.

I was raised in a devout Southern Baptist household in rural Texas. My family’s belief system was the firm, unwavering foundation of our home; every aspect of daily life was rooted in our faith. As a child, I was unusually tuned in to the suffering of those in bible stories-the violence, emotional trauma, and physical pain people endured. As I matured, I began to keenly observe and internalize the suffering of those around me, particularly those within my church. I was profoundly interested in how people processed and survived trauma and grief, and how gracefully they endured emotional pain. Even now, I tend to bury myself in the suffering of others; I am often empathetic to a fault.

Matthew 11:28 reads: ‘Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’ To this day, this verse both comforts me and haunts me. I find hope woven into it, but also frustration and unfeasibility. I suffer from anxiety and find it nearly impossible to lay my own burdens down. In this work, I am probing into these furtive areas, investigating the management of pain in relationship to faith and deeply rooted belief systems.

To create the work, I sought out and rented a small house, and worked exclusively within it over the course of one year. The house itself is a direct reference to the home I grew up in; I wanted to re-activate and re-imagine the space where my understanding of faith is rooted. For each photograph, I fabricated site-specific installations and sculptures using biblically symbolic materials such as sheep’s wool, clay, and human hair. All twelve photographs are intricately staged and constructed within the rooms of the house, together with human subjects and sentimental objects from my 1980’s childhood home.