Jennifer Bolande (born 1957) is an American postconceptual artist.Ollman, Leah. "Jennifer Bolande: Cut up the newspaper, and random connections make for some unexpected depth," Los Angeles Times, December 15, 2018. Retrieved January 15, 2024.Stone, Katie. "Jennifer Bolande," Frieze, March 2005, p. 120–23. Retrieved January 16, 2024. Her art explores affinities and shifts of meaning among sets of objects and images across different contexts and media including sculpture, photography, film and installation.Cameron, Dan. "Jennifer Bolande," Artforum, Summer 1995. Retrieved January 16, 2024.Nisbet, James. "Jennifer Bolande," Artforum, October 2010. Retrieved January 15, 2024.Vogel, Wendy. "Jennifer Bolande, ICA, Philadelphia," Artforum, December 10, 2012. Retrieved January 15, 2024. She emerged in the early 1980s with work that expanded on ideas and strategies rooted in conceptualism, Pop, Arte Povera and the so-called Pictures Generation.Marincola, Paula. "Something to Do with Jennifer Bolande," Artforum, January 1989, p. 70–73. Retrieved January 15, 2024.Siegel, Katy. "Jennifer Bolande: Appliance House," Artforum, January 2000. Retrieved January 16, 2024.Maul, Tim. "Jennifer Bolande at Alexander and Bonin," Art in America, May 2008. Her work focuses on thresholds, liminal and peripheral spaces, and transitional moments—states she enacts by the repetition, accumulation and recontextualization of found materials.de Brugerolle, Marie. "Scoping Things on the Cutting Edge: A conversation between Jennifer Bolande and Marie de Brugerolle," Mousse Magazine, Fall 2018, p. 82–89. She frequently selects cultural artifacts on the verge of obsolescence or in flux—and thus acquiring new meanings—and archives, studies and reframes them.Grabner, Michelle. "Jennifer Bolande," Artforum, September 2010. Retrieved January 15, 2024. Artforum critic Paula Marincola wrote, "Bolande's highly individualized amalgam of sculpture and photography proceeds obliquely but precisely toward an accumulation of possible meanings. She is a connoisseur of unlikely but evocative details, of subliminally perceived, fragmentary images and events."
Bolande's work belongs to the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA),Museum of Modern Art. Jennifer Bolande, Globe Sightings: St. Marks Place, NYC, Collection. Retrieved January 15, 2024. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA),Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Jennifer Bolande, Artist. Retrieved January 15, 2024. Centre Pompidou,Centre Pompidou. Jennifer Bolande, Double landscape, Collection. Retrieved January 15, 2024. and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Jennifer Bolande, Artist. Retrieved January 15, 2024. She has exhibited at MOCA, the Whitney Museum, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and MAMCO, among others.Crimp, Douglas and Lynne Cooke (eds). Mixed Use, Manhattan: Photography and Related Practices, 1970s to the Present], Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2010.Molesworth, Helen (ed). This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. In 2007, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship.John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Jennifer Bolande, Fellows. Retrieved January 15, 2024. She is emerita professor at UCLA and is based in Los Angeles and Joshua Tree, California.UCLA Department of Art. UCLA Department of Art Faculty. Retrieved January 15, 2024.
Education and career Bolande was born in 1957 in Cleveland, Ohio. She earned a BFA from NSCAD University. After initially working in dance, choreography and drawing, she turned to found material from the media and urban landscape, influenced by the 1977 Artists Space exhibition, "Pictures." She received recognition for this work in the 1980s and 1990s through solo exhibitions at The Kitchen,Westerbeck, Colin. "Jennifer Bolande," Artforum, Summer 1982. Retrieved January 15, 2024. Artists Space,Lawson, Thomas. "Victor Alzamora and Jennifer Bolande," Artforum, March 1983. Retrieved January 15, 2024. Gallery Nature MorteGrundberg, Andy. "Jennifer Bolande," The New York Times, September 12, 1986. Retrieved January 16, 2024. and Metro Pictures in New York,Johnson, Ken. "Jennifer Bolande at Metro Pictures," Art in America, October 1988, p. 193–94.Cotter, Holland. "Jennifer Bolande," The New York Times, May 5, 1992. Retrieved January 16, 2024. and Margo Leavin in Los Angeles.Geer, Suvan. "La Cienega Area," Los Angeles Times, June 23, 1989. Retrieved January 15, 2024.
Bolande's later solo exhibitions have taken place at MoMA PS1, John Gibson Gallery, Alexander and Bonin and Magenta Plains in New York,Cotter, Holland. "Jennifer Bolande," The New York Times, March 17, 1995. Retrieved January 16, 2024.Princenthal, Nancy. "Jennifer Bolande at Alexander and Bonin," Art in America, January 2000, p. 113.Maul, Tim. "Jennifer Bolande: Persistence of Vision," The Brooklyn Rail, June 2023. Retrieved January 15, 2024. Pio Pico Gallery (Los Angeles),Berardini, Andrew. "Jennifer Bolande at Pio Pico," Artforum, March 2019. Retrieved January 15, 2024. Fotohof (Salzburg), Kunstraum Munich and Kunsthalle Palazzo (Switzerland), among others.Teibler, Claudia. "Ganz genau hinschauen," Münchener Merkur, June 12, 1995.Hoffmann, Justin, and Phillip Ursprung. Jennifer Bolande, Basel/Liestal: Kunsthalle Palazzo, 1995. Her 2010 retrospective at INOVA (Institute of Visual Arts) traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia and the Cal State LA Luckman Gallery. A monograph, Jennifer Bolande, Landmarks, was published in conjunction with the retrospective.Bankowsky, Jack, Rosetta Brooks, Ingrid Schaffner, Nicholas Frank, Christina Valentine and Dennis Balk. Jennifer Bolande, Landmarks, Geneva: JRP|Ringier, 2011. Retrieved January 15, 2024. She was also featured in the inaugural Desert X biennial (2017) and a MoMA screening of two of her films in 2022.Desert X. Jennifer Bolande, Visible Distance / Second Sight. Retrieved January 15, 2024.Museum of Modern Art. "An Evening with Jennifer Bolande,", Events. Retrieved January 15, 2024.
Work and reception The foundation of Bolande's art has been an inductive, often additive process operating in the space between photography and sculpture. Her inquiries often involve perception and the quirkiness of physical phenomena, exploring subjects across different media, while marking and collapsing distinctions between objects, images, memory and embodied experience. There is often a sense of filmic expectation and potentiality in her work, of events just completed or about to occur; some writers have deemed them "frozen movies."Makary, J. Louise. "Interview with Jennifer Bolande," Incite!, August 2012. Retrieved January 15, 2024. While certain tendencies in Bolande's art link her to the Pictures Generation (media consciousness, appropriation), critics note qualities that set the work apart from that group's cool criticality and slickness: its warm, often absurd humor and lack of cynicism; a near-obsessive attachment to idiosyncratic subjects; a funky, cast-off, lo-fi aesthetic; and an elusive inner logic.
Photographic and assemblage works, 1980–2008 In the 1980s, Bolande's art centered on found image and object assemblages that New York Times critic Holland Cotter described as "a kind of controlled recycling characterized by low-key wit, lively inventiveness and a subtle eye for metaphor." The work explored processes of reproduction and reception involving sound and sight, accumulating oblique meanings by stacking, resizing and reframing fragmentary, intangible and peripheral events and motifs—among them, the ignored furniture in porn movies, inert Marshall amplifiers and speaker cones, vintage refrigerator doors.Weinstein, Matthew A. "Jennifer Bolande," Artforum, November 1988. Retrieved January 15, 2024. Her exhibitions often functioned like catalogues of ideas: piled binary relationships involving texture and color, points of simultaneous meeting and division, dichotomies of medium, and emotional and psychological oppositions whose syntactic richness suggested poetry lines and verses (e.g., Stack of Shims and Marshall's Stack, 1987). Milk Crown (1987) was an early exemplar of her method, exploring an image through a "life cycle" of various physical and experiential states. It was a delicate cast-porcelain rendering of Harold Edgerton's iconic, high-speed 1957 image of a splashing milk drop in which she converted the ephemeral into the solidly permanent, commenting on the original's effort to capture the invisible.
In subsequent works, Bolande paired related motifs to different effect. Her exhibition "Road Movie" (1995) played with boundaries between real and aesthetic objects, juxtaposing photographs of brightly colored, full-sized trucks in odd formations with shots of toy trucks, their scale indicated by a human index, such as a finger; arranged in a kind of jump-cut sequence, the images suggested the sense of narrative and total control endemic to both film direction and child's play. Appliance House (1998–99) matched two 1950s relics once premised on newness and defined by the cube—Lever House, the eponymous soap company's landmark International Style office tower, and a cut-rate Lower East Side appliance store—each representing opposite ends of Manhattan's East Side and the laundry-soap business. The architectural, stainless-steel framed sculpture featured backlit night photographs of windows revealing high-modernist office interiors or rows of used washing machines that Artforum's Katy Siegel noted for their "spooky melancholy," humanity and loneliness.
In Earthquake (2004), Bolande revisited the cube, loudspeakers and washer/dryers in two rhyming works—a film and a stacked assemblage. Her "Smoke Screens" exhibition (2008) featured small groups of tinted photographic prints of smoke placed on large sheets of plywood. She played the Rorschach-like textures of the wood grain off those of the prints; a conical plaster tabletop sculpture, Plume (2007), froze an image of smoke in form and time.
Public artworks
Bolande reprised the plywood visual theme in her first public-art project, Plywood Curtains (2010), a series of installations presented in vacated storefronts throughout Los Angeles.Knight, Christopher. "Jennifer Bolande @ West of Rome," Los Angeles Times, September 30, 2010. Retrieved January 15, 2024. Inviting both a double take and acknowledgment of an ongoing economic downturn in viewers, she hung drapery printed with the graphic image of plywood inside the empty windows, mimicking the familiar sight of boarded-up storefronts.
The site-specific Desert X project, Visible Distance/Second Sight (2017), invited another double take that encapsulated Bolande's collapsing of images, the cinematic and embodied experience. It consisted of three double-sided highway billboards that reproduced her enlarged photographs of the distant San Jacinto, Santa Rosa and San Bernardino mountain ranges. They were placed and scaled in order to facilitate what critic Christopher Knight called a "fleeting, disconcerting moment" for drivers in which "the wordless pictures line up exactly with the approaching view."Knight, Christopher. "International Art Invades the Suburban Coachella Valley: The Best of 'Desert X,'" Los Angeles Times, March 9, 2017. Retrieved January 15, 2024.
Later exhibitions