Jennifer West. Action Movies, Painted Films and History Collages

The first solo exhibition of Jennifer West in an Italian museum, curated by Lorenzo Giusti, is comprised of a group of ten films created starting from 2005 and a new work that represents a turning point in the artist’s production. 

Her program’s centerpiece is Film Title Poem (2016) – “a psychic montage of my inner history of film” – for which West re-shot more than 500 existing movie title cards on 35mm film and manipulated the print with etched patterns, scratches and punctures before transferring it to HD. This feature, sensual, partly abstract, partly imagistic work delves into how fiction weaves itself into our memories and how our viewing experience has changed with the digital revolution.

Jennifer West began her systematic research into the possibility of shooting films without using a camera as far back as 2004. The artist removes the film from its conventional context by applying different processes that range from traditional artistic techniques (painting, drawing, collage, grafitti, etching) to alternative actions such as emulsion, chemical manipulation and direct exposure of the photosensitive material to light. The result is a “filmic space”, immersive and psychedelic, a material animation of signs and images characterized by acid tones and nervous rhythms.

In some instances conceivedas authentic performances, Jennifer West’s work on the film often calls for the inclusion of other persons, as well as daily use materials (food, lipstick, motorcycle tires…), or exposure to natural elements in places of special impact.

This is the case of Salt Crystal Spiral Jetty Dead Sea Five Years Film (2013), one of the ten works on exhibition: it was created by immersing 70mm film in the clay and salt of the Dead Sea, at high temperatures in 2008 and then placing it in a suitcase.  The film sat in buckets in the artist’s studio, covering it with clay for five years and finally pulling it over the rocks encrusted with salt crystals of Robert Smithson’s renowned Spiral Jetty, before being thrown into the icy waters of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, in the attempt to evoke the original spirit of the work and the poetic vision of this American artist.