Joelle Jensen: Nesting

Events in an artist’s life sometimes influence her work, and artworks are like children in their period of gestation and development. Brooklyn-based artist Joelle Jensen heard the word “nesting” when she was pregnant, and the word imprinted itself on her consciousness. She found it more complex than just creating a nurturing home; it resonates with issues of the nuclear family as a unit, as well as the family’s larger place in society.

She cut up existing family photographs, reassembled the strips of images into ball-like shapes and photographed those assemblages. Seemingly abstract except for random fragments of facial features, these objects recall the shape of the nucleus of an atom, as well as objects of refuse, both falling apart and somehow held together. These “nests” achieve an uncanny emotional tone—both removed, because of their unusual visual aspect, and oddly moving, as they still contain something of the human, the familial, the familiar.

There’s an organic quality to these images, as we accept objects of refuse as a natural phenomenon, but also a strange kind of artifice, a composure in their decomposure and recomposure, a sense of unity in their whirls of identity. It’s another show in which House Gallery—known as the local “house” of abstract art—indicates ways in which abstraction collides with the world of representational objects in art, and the result is a look at things anew. (Brian Staker)

Joelle Jensen: Nesting @ House Gallery, 29 E. 400 South, 801-322-1027, through Nov. 26; reception Nov. 18, 6-9 p.m., free. HouseGallerySLC.com