Portrait of The Artist As Nell, Oil on canvas, 2006
What drives Jennifer Webster’s work?
“What’s is all about, Alfie?”*
Jennifer Webster was born in Chicago Illinois and spent most of her life living in the city and suburbs and Chicago. She considers her formative experiences of traveling out west, camping and exploring the mountains, canyons and desert, then returning to the lush Midwest as influential to her visions as an artist. This conflicting, super-imposition of vastly different landscapes, of the exterior and natural world as well as her interior psychological world, remains a central guiding force in her work.
Jennifer has found people to be a compelling source of interest and has recently let this fascination find its exploration in her paintings. Contemplating the “interiors” of her self, her friends, and people she is intrigued with is the force behind this work. She creates hybrid psychic/psychological interiors of people in places partly imagined, remembered, invented and witnessed, derived from what she “know”s and “see”s, what she intuits and imagines. This magical and psychic process is thrilling and exciting, and it igniting her need to make these paintings.
Jennifer feels a strong alignment with some of the concerns of the Surrealists’ work, which are still relevant to our contemporary concerns – the political, the psycho/ social, and spiritual, grappling with the sub-conscious, working within yet pushing against established systems. Metaphorically these Surrealist underpinnings are the paradoxical…the necessary destruction before creation, beauty in ugliness, the pain in pleasure, the end and the beginning. She aspires to create paintings that feel strangely familiar, or that show the familiar to be be quite strange.
Typically she begins her paintings with a catastrophic mark, which then evolve into drips and stains, referring to psychological and physical residue, the fluidity of memories and emotions. The integration of patterns, geometry, seemingly solid, tangible objects, the structure of what seems tangible in life provide the rub. Images drawn from nature such as plants and animals, and ever increasingly, people, enter in to these memorial conjurings.
Cumulatively these elements evoke a magical realism that work with and against each other to evoke patterns in human nature, life-cycles, psycho-logical/emotional states, memory and the creative process. They are both literal and figural “interiors” having psychological, social, metaphysical, and spiritual layers. Images and painting qualities are superimposed, and often conflict. Distinctions are blurred between the natural plant and animal world, the manufactured and designed/architectural world, and the accidental. An untethered-ness, a sense of being unmoored in the inter-twining, folding, and undulating imagery speaks to the condition of our time.
Jennifer sees her work as a part of the collective consciousness, one of many Janus heads gazing back to the past, nodding to her art-historical ancestors, and pulling them with her into the present moment, creating new meaning, new ways of seeing. Focused very much on the present while working, her brush is her arrow, pointing the way to a new paradigm of the future.
“She is like a cat in the dark…and then she is the darkness.” – Fleetwood Mac, Rhiannon
WEBSTERS MYTHOLOGY / CAST OF CHARACTERS
There are a cast of characters that enter in the paintings, the way characters move on and off stage in theater. They create a mythology in the work, embodying the mystical, romantic, cheeky, sweet, tough, witchy-poo and irreverent. This cast is ever-evolving…
Cats: Irreverent pussies
Checker Board / Squares: the “game”, a journey, interior or exterior structure, grid; terrestrial grid; a magical geometry.
Circle: moon; sun; a magical geometry.
Flowers: Enticing; vaginal; luring/alluring “the feminine”; decorative; poisonous, the grandmother. (Iris, Poppy, Rose, Geranium, Forget-Me-Not)
Fork, Corner: indicating an interior vs exterior; the inner world of the human self; a room, a container.
Major Arcana from my invented Tarot: Figures embodying particular powers, qualities, aspects of the human experience.
Razzle Dazzle: Disruption; disorientation; fragmentation; confusion, lies.
Stripes: Order out of chaos; structure; society; cities; the mind.
Tongues: Fire; Sexual energy; cunnilingus and penis; mocking; cheeky, also irreverent; also pussy.
Trees: Ancestors; protectors; directionals; connection: air and earth.
Triangle: inverted - female energy, water; upright - male energy, earth, air; also a directional, a magical geometry.
Turkey Vultures (Catharsis Aura): The harbingers of “a breath of fresh air”, the cleansers, the healers. These magnificent and oft misunderstood creatures cleanse our environment of carcasses of other dead animals. They prevent disease while eliminating “that which is no longer needed”. An important cycle in life, that we all need to employ at times.
Vulva: The Vortex of Power, Creation, Life.
Water: Flow: the subconscious; feminine; dreams; a mirror or the sky.
*Song lyrics
What's it all about Alfie
Is it just for the moment we live
What's it all about
When you sort it out, Alfie
Are we meant to take more than we give
Or are we meant to be kind?
And if, if only fools are kind, Alfie
Then I guess it is wise to be cruel
And if life belongs only to the strong, Alfie
What will you lend on an old golden rule?
As sure as I believe there's a heaven above
Alfie, I know there's something much more
Something even non-believers can believe in
I believe in love, Alfie
Without true love we just exist, Alfie
Until you find the love you've missed
You're nothing, Alfie
When you walk let your heart lead the way
And you'll find love any day Alfie, Alfie
Songwriters: David Hal / Bacharach Burt F
Sung by Dionne Warwick
Curriculum Vitae
B. 1971 Chicago, Il
Lives and works in Union Pier, MI
EDUCATION
Masters of Fine Arts, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2018
Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Graphic Design, Minor in Art History, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2009, 1991-95
HGK Hochschule Für Gestaltung und Kunst, Luzern, Switzerland, 2008
Rome Summer Program in Studio Arts and Art History, “Site-ing the Wall”, University of Illinois Chicago, 1997
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
Lipman Hearne, Chicago, IL, 2011
Cliff Dwellers Club, Chicago, IL, 2011
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
HANKY PANKY, 5th Annual River North Design Destrict Gallery Walk, 210 DesignHouse, with Ruthie Alan designs 2019
As We Recompose, Gallery 400, UIC, 2018
Open Studio, Great Space, University of Illinois at Chicago, Curated by January Parkos Arnall, 2018
Open Studio, Great Space, University of Illinois at Chicago, Curated by Michael Darling, 2017
The Art of Design, Susan Fredman Design Group, Chicago, IL, 2013
Botanic/Organic, Union Street Gallery, Chicago Heights, IL, 2012
AIR Artist’s in Residency Show, The Cliff Dwellers Club, Chicago, IL, 2004
27th Annual Alice and Arthur Baer Art Exhibition, Beverly Arts Club, Chicago, IL, 2003
On Your Mark 25th Anniversary Exhibition, Artemisia Gallery, Chicago, IL, 1998
Converging Boundaries, Gallery 400, Chicago, IL, 1997
Site-ing The Wall, University of Washington Residency Studio, Palazzo Pio, Rome Italy, 1997
On-Longing, Chastain-Zollinger, Chicago, IL, 1996
Blurred Boundaries, Evie Camp Loft, Chicago, IL, 1995
Benefit for Harbor Home, Cairo, Chicago, IL, 1993
Re-Meaning, New Works Gallery, Chicago, IL, 1992
RESIDENCIES
AIR, The Cliff Dwellers Club, Chicago, IL, 2004
AWARDS & HONORS
UIC Art Department Scholarship 2016-18
UIC Faculty Selection for Graphic Design in Luzern Switzerland Program, HGK Hochschule fur Gestaltung und Kunst, Luzern, CH, 2007
27th Annual Alice and Arthur Baer Competition Exhibition monetary award, 2003
Koppe Family Memorial Scholarship for Studio Artist, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1993
Koppe Family Memorial Prize for Studio Artist, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1993
TEACHING
Instructor, Teaching Fellowship, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2017 - 2018