Exhibition

Jen DeNike & Pola Sieverding: we tell ourselves stories in order to live

2 Dec 2020 – 9 Jan 2021

Regular hours

Wednesday
12:00 – 18:00
Thursday
12:00 – 18:00
Friday
12:00 – 18:00
Saturday
12:00 – 18:00
Tuesday
12:00 – 18:00

Save Event: Jen DeNike & Pola Sieverding: we tell ourselves stories in order to live

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signs and symbols is pleased to present we tell ourselves stories in order to live, a two-person lens-based photography exhibition by Jen DeNike and Pola Sieverding. The exhibition reflects on storytelling; the artist’s lens becomes the ink that captures her fantastic stage and experiences in time.

About

signs and symbols is pleased to present we tell ourselves stories in order to live, a two-person lens-based photography exhibition by Jen DeNike and Pola Sieverding. The exhibition reflects on storytelling; the artist’s lens becomes the ink that captures her fantastic stage and experiences in time.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live... We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” —Joan Didion, The White Album, 1979

She tells herself stories in order to sort through her complex emotions, her realities, her truths. Her story manifests through different forms and muses. Her lens a window, the landscape her journal, crafting stories of her life, of people she knows, personal stories, intimate stories. She is the artist, she is the creator, she creates the universe and that is the source of her power. Does she create delusion to get by? A precarious slip between fact and fiction. A seemingly ever-present possibility that anything can be true while proven to be a fabrication. Through her narratives, she takes ownership of her future tense.

She who tells a story. Her perspective of the world interweaves and sculpts time – an idyllic landscape, the existential meaning of the female body, time freezes in agelessness, not a death scene but one of life. An erotic thirst. She is nature. She is nurture. She casts her in myriad roles. Daughters, sisters, a mother, a lover, a goddess, her mother, my mother, our mother. She daydreams as we wait for the light. She lies in the water. She escapes reality by floating in garlands of flowers. She is water. Unaware of her surroundings, of growth and decay patterns. She comes to terms with disorder, amused in thought. She possess a willingness to question the things in life that we trust and the assumptions we make. An imagined utopia. Each storyteller offers a vision of a universe she has perceived and created, expressing the course of time within the frame. She emphasizes drama through the use of lighting contrast and attention to the female figure. Her topic of choice is surely the body. Waves ripple through her honeyed hair. Her stone-skin torso the container of desires. She casts off what binds her, a fragmentation drenched in sweat, a fabric shell. She gasps for air.

A click of the shutter captures the light.
She who tells her story.

What to expect? Toggle

CuratorsToggle

Mitra Khorasheh

Exhibiting artistsToggle

Jen DeNike

Pola Sieverding

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