The Jenni Crain Foundation

Jenni Crain (1991–2021) was an esteemed artist and curator who passed away suddenly due to complications related to Covid-19. She was widely recognized for her original minimalist sculpture and curatorial projects that championed under-recognized women artists as well as for her rigorous scholarship and writing. Crain was a passionate and tireless advocate of artists and art. Throughout her life, she built a vast community of friends, collaborators, and colleagues whose work she drove forward with generosity, sensitivity, and the deep probing intelligence with which she considered the world.

The Foundation preserves her legacy by supporting transformative projects by artists, curators, and writers of any age at early or pivotal stages of their career.

In honor of her memory, The Jenni Crain Foundation provides grants in two areas:
1. Finishing funds toward the completion of a significant project ranging from an exhibition, arts publication, or work of art across disciplines and forms.
2. Support for original research which may include travel, accommodation, and any funds required for accessing or studying materials.

Donations may be mailed to the address below or made online by clicking here.

A fundraising bandana featuring Crain’s work may be purchased by clicking here. An image of the bandana can be viewed by clicking here.

The Jenni Crain Foundation
130 Third Avenue Brentwood, NY 11717
info@JenniCrainFoundation.org

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Jenni Crain

Bent To Its Own Image
The Java Project, Brooklyn, NY
October 18 – November 15, 2015

The Java Project is pleased to announce Bent To Its Own Image, a solo exhibition by Jenni Crain opening Sunday, October 18th, 2015.

The exhibition continues Crain’s exploration of architectural implications as impetus for emotive reverberation. Employing the gallery as a medium itself, Crain manipulates the space’s specific parameters as subject to a frame. The glass wall of entry contextualized as the picture plane. The plane, a theoretical surface located between the eye point of the viewer and the material surface of the work, here embodied by the physicality of the glass, serving both as window and as wall as it distinguishes a simultaneous parallel/divide between a palpable and implied distance of observation or point of view. This duplicity demonstrative of Crain’s extended interest in and investigation of the spatial and emotional capacities of interior versus exterior/internal versus external.

The title, Bent To Its Own Image, describing both the exhibition in its totality, as well as the two photographs of which it is comprised is derived from a passage of Virginia Woolf’s novel, To The Lighthouse, first published in 1927. A novel understood as rendering a perception rather than a depiction of time and as “giving language to the silent space that separates people and the space that they transgress to reach other.” Bent To Its Own Image (1) and Bent To Its Own Image (2) exist as two versions of the same image. (1), printed 4 inches x 6 inches, the measurement of a standard print, is adhered via adhesive photo corners to the internal plane of the glass pane at the front of the gallery. (2), printed at a scale 10 x the size of (1), is installed utilizing a material language indicative of the artist’s sculptural works at the back wall of the gallery. Upon entry into the gallery space, the image of (1) is no longer visible as its subject is reciprocally replaced by the branded backing of the photographic paper. As the viewer approaches (2), the image becomes increasingly distorted as the photographic grain integrates into an abstract image. A navigation of the individual exhibitional properties proffers little direction, while the event of engagement amongst subject and environment provides opportunity for reaction apropos interaction. An event expounded by the image itself, where distortion in focus and framing motivate an envisaged moment implemented by mind and memory rather than pictorial depiction.

(For quotation: See Harcourt, Inc. publication of Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. Copyright 1927 by Harcourt, Inc, Copyright renewed 1955 by Leonard Woolf. Foreword copyright 1981 by Eudora Welty.)

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Bent To Its Own Image (1), 2015. Optical print on Kodak Royal paper, adhesive photo corners. 4 x 6 inches

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Bent To Its Own Image (2), 2015. Inkjet print on Hahnemuhle Museum Etching paper, baltic birch plywood cleat, museum board facing, pass-through hinge, BEVA adhesive, hardware. 44 x 1.5 x 64 inches

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