Jennifer West

Jennifer West (b. 1966, Topanga, CA) is a Los Angeles-based artist who has explored materialism in film for over fifteen years. Significant commissions include works for Seattle Art Museum (2016-2017); Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2016); The High Line, New York, NY (2012); MIT List Visual Arts Center (2011); Aspen Art Museum (2010); and Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London (2009). West has had solo exhibitions at Times Square Arts, New York, NY (2021); JOAN Los Angeles (2020); Contemporary Art Museum St Louis (2018); Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China (2017); Seattle Art Museum (2016-2017); Museo d’Arte Nuoro, Sardinia (2017); Tramway, Glasgow (2016); S1 Artspace, Sheffield, UK (2012); Kunstverein Nürnberg, Germany (2010); Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, (2010); Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (2008); White Columns, New York, NY (2007). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at The Whitney Museum, New York, NY; Drawing Center, New York, NY; Pompidou Centre, Paris; Kunsthalle Schirn, Frankfurt; Centre for Contemporary Visual Arts, Bordeaux; and ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany, among others. Her work is in museum and public collections such as and the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China; Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Kadist Foundation (San Francisco/Paris), Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Depart Foundation (Rome); Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania; Henry Art Gallery (Seattle); Rubell Collection (Florida); Saatchi Collection (London), Thoma Foundation Digital and Media Art Collection (New Mexico/Illinois), among others. West received an MFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and a BA from the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. She is an Associate Professor of the Practice of Fine Arts at USC’s Roski School of Art and Design in California. Her writing has appeared in publications including Artforum, Frieze, and Mousse Magazine. West has produced fifteen zine artist books, which are in Getty Research Institute Collection (Los Angeles, CA). Upcoming in 2022, a monograph on her work is being published by Radius Books, Media Archaeology, she will show her work at the Pompidou in Paris, France, and is producing a new commission for the LIAF Biennial in Norway.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It took place in February 2022.

GM: What was your path to becoming an artist?

JW: I came to art via the process of analog photography, zine making, and eventually working with 16mm and analog videotape such as VHS and Hi8. In seventh grade, I took “Shop Class” , where we learned about the printing press and copy stand photography. This was the first time I experienced the magic of the darkroom, working under red lights in partial darkness with the smell of darkroom chemistry, swishing liquids, and watching an image appear. At the time, xerox machines were hard to access and it was not easy to make an image, which made the darkroom an important tool. My mother is an artist and had her studio in our house when I was growing up, so I was exposed to art making through her. When I was a teenager, my friends and I would help her fabricate her work when she was on deadlines working as a proofreader. I cite her as a big influence on my use of materials later on for my films, as she often made work utilizing unusual materials – painting with nail polish on rice paper in the 70’s, and later working on linoleum floor tiles, postcards using prismatic foil. I started making and shooting 16mm films at Evergreen State College; I used film at that time because it was the most economical way to make a moving image. I studied feminist and world cinema, mostly modes of experimental documentary, such as filmmakers like Trinh T. Minh-ha and Barbara Hammer. I moved to the Bay Area to go to graduate school at San Francisco State University, where Trinh taught, and instead ended up working in the film industry. I continued making films but failed to make more narrative based work. At the same time, I collected a lot of raw stock 16mm film in my fridge. These cans of film moved with me back to Washington State, where I started to make video installations and got involved in the underground art scene. The film eventually moved with me again when I returned to California to attend the MFA Program at Art Center in Pasadena. At the end of my time at Art Center, I started thinking about film negative and celluloid as malleable material, and combining conceptual ideas to filmmaking and in relation to performance, mark making, and painting. (Continued)

Installation view of Jennifer West: Flashlight Filmstrip Projections, at Tramway, 2016. © Tramway. Photo: Keith Hunter

Immediately after graduating, I was invited to contribute to a group exhibition at the Anna Helwing Gallery called “Celine and Julie Go Boating” , curated by Michael Ned Holte. For the show I made “Marinated Film - the roll of 16Mm I had in the fridge for over ten years (16mm film negative marinated for several months in: Absinthe & XTC, Pepsi & Pop rocks, Jim Shaw's Urine, Red Wine, Coffee & Detox Tea, Aphrodisiacs)” (2005), 9 minutes, 20 seconds, 16mm film transferred to digital video. From there I started making film by corroding, painting, puncturing, cooking, etc., 16mm film negative. I eventually started to shoot images on the film and experiment with 35 and 70mm film stocks. I started showing the films as digital projections, often in pairings or groupings in gallery and art spaces. The early works were about smell and taste in relation to film, everyday materials, products, and local non-monumental sites.

GM: What was your experience with your solo exhibition, “Jennifer West: Future Forgetting” (2020), at JOAN in

Los Angeles?

JW: The exhibition opened on February 28th, 2020 and will forever be marked in time by the beginning of the worldwide pandemic. There were two main bodies of work that formed the show, both of which had been started years prior. They brought ideas to bear that I had been thinking about while reading Norman Klein’s “History of Forgetting” (1997) and connected to the city of Los Angeles – historical erasure, scripted spaces, phantom limbs, preservation, and fiction though film location. This all had to do with the 6th Street Bridge in Downtown LA that was slated for demolition in 2016. I decided to film the last three days that the bridge was open to the public on 16mm, documenting everything that took place as people said goodbye to the bridge. I processed the film with no exact plans for it and put it in a box. I was reminded of the film in 2018 by a friend, took out the footage, and began to plan how to finish it. My films tend to have multiple phases of production and fabrication, which include shooting, processing, and then altering the filmstrips later to complete the work. The reason the bridge was demolished was because it had gotten concrete cancer, which made it erode – this was caused by the Los Angeles River water that was used to mix the cement. (Continued)

Left: Installation view of Jennifer West: Future Forgetting, at JOAN, 2020. © JOAN. Photo: David Matorin. Right: Jennifer West, Future Forgetting Accordion Zine, 2020. Photo: Peter West

I decided to drag the 700 feet of film in the water of the river, just below the construction site of the new bridge – the process corroded the image and that became the finished film. The second exhibited body of work revolves around broken televisions and flatscreens that had been thrown off bridges (not by me) that I found in the Arroyo Seco Confluence, a cemented riverbed that feeds into the LA River. During my walks over the years, I had noticed many broken screens, and in 2018 began collecting the remnants. Later, I arranged the broken parts into a grid on green screen fabric, and shot 16mm film of them. This work became the basis of a large 9-flatscreen TV and sculptural installation for the show. I collected cast off debris out of the LA River – broken technology, old CD’s, parts of boom boxes, an electric piano, and objects such as an arrow, part of a golf club, and so forth. [Other memories of the show include] doing my first zoom webinar/public program, which seemed novel at the time (with writer/historian Norman Klein and writer/curator Lauren Mackler). During quarantine, the show sat there and I led walkthroughs of the exhibition for a few months. There was a series of sculptures – hand-blown glass mason jars by Becca Chernow that were filled with Los Angeles River water – photos, and objects as the exhibition continued well past its planned end date in April 2020. The water slowly evaporated in the jars, creating rings of sediment (a trace recording of all that transpired during the exhibition) from the pandemic and social justice movement that the show will forever be linked to.

GM: What was your experience creating “Painted Cat Hacker Film” (2020/2021), as well as its installation in Times Square that lasted for the entirety of August 2021?

JW: Cats entered my work by happenstance – I was shooting a 16mm set up of broken television parts on my front porch, and two of my cats repeatedly walked into the shots. I incorporated the cats into the piece, which was shown at JOAN. For a few years before that, I had researched making a hologram of a cat for an exhibition. I embarked on making “Cat Clone Hologram #1-3” (2021), which were displayed on holofans in order to pay homage to the rich history of the feline as muse in experimental and avant-garde film and video art, and their recent explosion on the Internet in funny cat videos, memes, and gifs. To create the spectral and lo-fi effects in “Painted Cat Hacker Film” , I first compiled 16mm clips of my cat, Munchkin, against a green screen. I manipulated the image by applying brightly colored dye to the filmstrip before transferring it to high-definition video. The resulting piece is a multi-channel work of handmade digitized GIFs that pay homage to the feline’s role across many moving image genres – from the viral video, to experimental film, to the screens of Times Square themselves. […] I had never been to Times Square before going for the opening of the show, and it was a wild experience to have the cats take over so many screens simultaneously to hundreds of unsuspecting viewers – I thought of them as hackers, taking over the advertising apparatuses with their image.

Installation view of Jennifer West: Painted Cat Hacker Film, at Times Square Arts, 2021. © Times Square Arts. Photo: Tatyana Tenenbaum

Installation view of Jennifer West: Emoji Wall of Film, at CAPITAL SF, 2018. © CAPITAL. Photo: Jonathan Runcio

GM: In your opinion, what are some common roadblocks that female filmmakers deal with in the industry?

JW: I’ll speak specifically about art, experimental and avant-garde film, and video art. I think it’s important for makers to master as much technology as possible and work with as many other womxn identified technicians, dig into the history of the field to find examples, and proliferate their work through lectures, writing, and curating, in order to continually remind everyone everywhere about womxn and other non-mainstream voices out there. Video cameras were a brilliant opportunity for womxn to enter a new field, so thinking of new media and ways to experiment in mediums that don’t yet have a written history. Forming collectives is good and also has a history. In such a masculinist field, [it’s important to be] intersectional in every way possible.

GM: What has been your experience with your platform, Infinite Kisses?

JW: Infinite Kisses was a one-off pandemic idea born out of lockdown – I wanted to create a space for filmmakers and artists to make artist books, zines, or multiples, and distribute them and be virtually in conversation. I named the platform after Carolee Schneemann's "Infinity Kisses" (1981-1987) as a homage to her filmmaking and work with cats. Jodie Mack, the filmmaker, made a glow in the dark flip book, and we did a black light performance together on IG Live that was a lot of fun and included the artists Casey Kauffmann, Puppies Puppies, and Panteha Abareshi. I’ ve been making zines in relation to my work since I started exhibiting in 2007. Mostly it was a way of making a visual catalog to accompany my shows, and it’s in the spirit of DIY to self-produce and distribute outside of publishing structures. [It was also] a space for my production stills – digital snap shots of the material and absurd actions I used to make my films, whether its cooking 16mm in eggs or throwing it into the Great Salt Lake.

GM: What are you currently working on in your practice?

JW: I am creating a series of works for an exhibition in the fall, using the 16mm footage I collected that documented the destruction of LACMA’s buildings during the pandemic lockdown. The exhibition uses the year without summer (1916) as its theme; my work will be around themes of history, forgetting, archiving for the future, vertical time, and mutated biological and frozen preservation and phantasms.

GIRLS MAGAZINE