Jennifer Bolande: The Composition of Decomposition

About

Magenta Plains is pleased to announce The Composition of Decomposition, Jennifer Bolande’s first solo exhibition in New York since 2008. Through sculpture, photographs, and photo-reliefs the works on view consider news and history, stacking and excavating, composition and decomposition.

The exhibition articulates new developments in Bolande’s decades-long engagement with the delineations between the flatness and transitory nature of images and the presentness of dimensional space. This body of work began with a picture Bolande came across in The New York Times of a group 14th century plague victims whose remains had been excavated from a London cemetery. Gradually yellowing in her archive, this image of decomposing bones launched Bolande on a six-year inquiry into newspapers as shapers of meaning.

For the sculpture Image Tomb, Bolande cut through an aging stack of newspapers dating 2013-2015, creating an excavation site of its own and a final resting place for the image of the skeletons. The removed core produced the chance pairings seen in the photographic diptychs on view and the film titled The Composition of Decomposition. In contrast, two white sculptures cast from stacked newspapers titled Ghost Columns solidify an otherwise transient form, while alluding to the narrow architecture of newspaper columns. A group of photographs record the changing patterns of light as well as happenstance constellations of pushpins on empty bulletin boards. A series of blue pigmented photo-reliefs extrude this light into physical form. 

On March 16th at 7pm, The Museum of Modern Art will present the New York premiere of Bolande’s film, The Composition of Decomposition. The film looks into the way information is conditioned by the frameworks through which it is received and how meaning shifts and transmogrifies in the passage from one material or context to another—from page to screen, “news” to history. With the newspaper dematerializing and new technologies radically transforming how we experience the events of the world, the film immerses the viewer in a rhythmic sequence of fragments and an ever-changing flow of information crumbs—some emotionally charged, others implacably neutral, some oddly funny and others curiously cryptic. More information can be found here: https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/6548

Jennifer Bolande (b. 1957, Cleveland, OH) is a Los Angeles based artist who came of age as part of New York’s Pictures Generation. Rooted in conceptualism, her work employs various media – primarily sculpture, photography, sculpture, and film – to explore the quiet affinities between particular sets of objects and images, and the mercurial meanings they manufacture. Reviewing an exhibition of her work at Metro Pictures, The New York Times’ critic Holland Cotter praised Bolande’s art for its “low-key wit, lively inventiveness, and subtle eye for metaphor.” Bolande was recently included in museum exhibitions such as Celebration of Our Enemies, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Readymades Are For Everyone, Swiss Institute, New York, NY; Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; Mixed Use Manhattan, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, ES; and This Will Have Been, Art Love and Politics in the 1980s, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL, which travelled to Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, and ICA, Boston, MA. In 2010, a thirty-year retrospective of her work was organized by INOVA in Milwaukee, WI and later travelled to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA and the Luckman Gallery at CSU, Los Angeles, CA. Her award-winning, site-specific project “Visible Distance/Second Sight'' was featured in the inaugural Desert X in Coachella Valley, CA, in 2017. Bolande is Professor of New Genres in the Department of Art at UCLA.