Jennifer Viviano

The year of our reckoning. That is what 2020 felt like to me. We were lucky in our household to not suffer in the way so many did, however my heart churned daily with everything that was so utterly exposed. Not that I didn’t know these things were who we are, but when all is laid bare there is nothing to do but become intimate with the totality of it. To grieve, to rage, to be in awe. These drawings—which I made like one works prayer beads—are what resulted. There are many of them. I usually work quite large, but these are tiny, four and some inches by maybe six inches. It seemed as if I needed to be very close, to hold everything I felt in my hands. To melt and saturate a surface, to scratch into it, to rub away or press in a cloud, to burnish it in the end. Perhaps I was able to understand a bit or at least make something visible, something small, something to take with us into the future.

I often find myself in a struggle between the primacy of thinking and the sensory desire of making. One of my main intentions is to still the mind by using my hands. This body of work specifically addresses the notion of thought and what it looks like or perhaps a visual expression of what it feels like. It is a growing set of pieces that include drawings and sculptural pieces made from porcelain.

With this object, I am addressing a space that allows us to contemplate new ways of knowing. This space is both a process and a portal. It is also a dedication to all that our world is and what we can know of it—as well as that which we can never know. I am attempting to shift our—and my own—understanding of the world from a reliance on linearity towards a deeper encounter with not knowing. Much of this altered understanding comes from a direct engagement with the “more than human” world, whether that is with the wild or through the objects we make. It also occurs via the body, through the act of craft; to that end my work process is deliberate, repetitive, and conceived of as a devotional offering. Recognizing the sacred and mysterious in our daily activities is central to this understanding as well as to our resilience and our generosity in how we live. In the end, the audience was able to interact with the sculpture by offering handfuls of broken glass to its center. The sound that it made and the sense of delight and reverence it engendered was a manifestation of our engagement with mystery.

I say akin to drawings because while they are borne of like elements—paper, graphite, chalk pastels—they don't always seem like drawings. Sometimes they seem like collage, sometimes they seem like sculptural objects, sometimes it is difficult to determine how the marks were made. These pieces reflect my curiosity with what is not quite definable. 

Despite the reductive, rational eye with which we have examined and explained our world, it remains an exquisite mystery. Life is delicate and tenuous and it takes place amidst perilous forces. Navigate/Discern points to the possibility and the danger of what we don’t know: the whimsy and the grace and the peril of that which is sharp and hidden and mysterious. This occurs in space, something that we must approach and navigate, and as signs and gestures we must interpret. This relationship between objects that direct us and marks that we must discern, even if we are uncertain of what our response should be to either, is the underlying quality of living in this world. We have made objects and marks that seem familiar and friendly and under our control or recognizable, however this deeper gesture always exists, describes our existence. My work process is based on response to material and mark. The edges where these qualities come together is the place where my interest and my response lies. The contours of the line and how it is bound, revealed, formed, seamed, obscured is the signal for my next gesture. The moment of pursuit or retreat. Navigating these moments are the repose of deep listening as I handle material and surrender to the agency of the material itself.

Hidden is both fact & interpretation. Slippery. Like memory & dream. Real things without reality, as unambiguous as shade.

It implies visibility—which is not clarity—and the need to discern readability from legibility. Obscurity from invisibility. Whether a thing is unknowable or simply incomprehensible.

Archeology has found us fragile texts: disembodied, hermetic, enciphered, soughing the unseen at the end as at the beginning.

The verso is only hidden momentarily—the other side, an utter mystery.

Torn. Stained. Cracked, without a complete separation of parts. Sundered, split apart, with nothing but bits remaining. How do we make meaning out of that which is no longer whole? We are reluctant to consider the broken. We eschew fragility and distance ourselves from what seems to be weakness. Yet, in addressing that which has fallen apart, we might find renewed strength, a sense of peace, perhaps even wisdom. Sometimes this means to repair, sometimes to gather up, sometimes to simply honor and witness the remains. In the act of gathering, stitching, drawing pieces together, I am revising their relationships and associations, considering both the rend and the space, the wound and the redemption. In bringing our attention to bear on that which is broken, perhaps be transformed by what it is that we think we cannot bear.

In our daily round we are constantly in dialog with the natural world or open to chance occurrences—even if we are not aware of this or try to control its emergence. Using found objects, such as sticks or rocks, as well as paper plaster, silk, graphite, the pieces I am making are revealed to me. Literally as I sand, scrape, and burnish surfaces to find a more resolved shape or embedded materials. Metaphorically, as a time based process that occurs in response to gestures that I initiate but am not ultimately in control of. Using found materials as a tool or other materials as filters or layers, I want to work in relationship with the unexpected. The aim of my work is to reflect and inspire the quality of attention I spend in creating my work, in the viewer. In What Gets Revealed, the viewer has the opportunity to interact with the drawing tool, allowing them the opportunity to glimpse what it is I am trying to experience and create.