Jeanne Jaffe
Inspired by an interest in language, literature, psychology, and history, Jeanne Jaffe's work explores how identity is forged from early pre-verbal experiences to the later influences of language, history, and cultural conditioning.
Jeanne Jaffe
Inspired by an interest in language, literature, psychology, and history, my work explores how identity is forged from early, pre-verbal, experience through the later influences of language and history and cultural conditioning.
The work follows two paths. In the sculptures based on pre-verbal experience, I give concrete form to intangible sensations and barely recalled bodily memories. This is accomplished by creating hybrid forms of mixed origins of experience - fusions of animate and inanimate worlds, simultaneously familiar yet strange. Body fragments, vegetative processes, and microscopic life fuse, mutate, and morph, and the resulting objects invite recognition, while remaining mutable, and suggestive. these works create a symbolic visual language with multiple connections. They exist in a liminal world of fluid identities, where self and the world are undifferentiated, before the mind and language categorizes, analyses, and limits meaning, encouraging the viewer to access their own associations.
In later installations such as “Alice in Dystopia”, ” Little Red Riding Hood as a Crime Scene”, “Elegy for Tesla “, and “Eliot’s Four Quartets”, popular folktales, history, and literature are reimagined through a contemporary lens creating a space to explore the implications of these known narratives and for reimagining new perspectives. These works challenge cultural assumptions and reinterpret old stories and beliefs provoking fresh ways of thinking new options of action, behavior, and agency in order to move towards a state of psychological freedom, enjoyment, and agency.
How we create meaning and self-determination from the cacophony of sensation, memory, language, and cultural history is the subject of all my work.
Statement
Inspired by an interest in language, literature, psychology, and history, my work explores how identity is forged from early, pre-verbal, experience through the later influences of language and history and cultural conditioning.
The work follows two paths. In the sculptures based on pre-verbal experience, I give concrete form to intangible sensations and barely recalled bodily memories. This is accomplished by creating hybrid forms of mixed origins of experience - fusions of animate and inanimate worlds, simultaneously familiar yet strange. Body fragments, vegetative processes, and microscopic life fuse, mutate, and morph, and the resulting objects invite recognition, while remaining mutable, and suggestive. these works create a symbolic visual language with multiple connections. They exist in a liminal world of fluid identities, where self and the world are undifferentiated, before the mind and language categorizes, analyses, and limits meaning, encouraging the viewer to access their own associations.
In later installations such as “Alice in Dystopia”, ” Little Red Riding Hood as a Crime Scene”, “Elegy for Tesla “, and “Eliot’s Four Quartets”, popular folktales, history, and literature are reimagined through a contemporary lens creating a space to explore the implications of these known narratives and for reimagining new perspectives. These works challenge cultural assumptions and reinterpret old stories and beliefs provoking fresh ways of thinking new options of action, behavior, and agency in order to move towards a state of psychological freedom, enjoyment, and agency.
How we create meaning and self-determination from the cacophony of sensation, memory, language, and cultural history is the subject of all my work.