This is a repost of an event listing at the Arts Warehouse from their website
Jeanne Jaffe “Past, Present…”
April 20 - May 29
A solo Exhibition by Installation and Sculpture Artist, Jeanne Jaffe, titled “Past, Present…”
How people create meaning from the complexity of sensation, memory, myth, and cultural history is the overarching theme of all of Jaffe’s work. Specifically, Jaffe uses her sculpture and installations to explore how identity is constructed from early pre-verbal bodily experience, and later influences of language and culture. The work selected for “Past, Present…” are examples of this exploration.
The pre-verbal sculptures give concrete form to intangible sensations and early bodily experiences by creating hybrid forms –fusions of animate and inanimate worlds – thus appearing simultaneously familiar, yet strange. Throughout Jaffe’s more recent body of work, well-known folktales, history, and poetry are re-imagined through a contemporary lens. This theme is specifically showcased in the “Past, Present…” exhibition as an installation based on poet T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartet’s”, a Buddhist-like meditation about letting go of all attachments.
Jeanne Jaffe is a multi-disciplinary artist who is Professor Emeritus in Multi-disciplinary Fine Arts at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, a visiting artist/professor at Xian Academy of Fine Arts in China each fall and the coordinator of International Projects at the Jaffe Center for Book Arts. Ms. Jaffe is the recipient of fellowship grants from the Gottlieb Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Mid Atlantic/NEA, Mino Artist Residency in Japan, the Leeway Foundation and the Virginia A. Groot Foundation among many others. Works by Ms. Jaffe were reviewed in Art in America, Sculpture Magazine, and exhibited both nationally and internationally.
Special Programming: During the run dates of the Exhibition, Jaffe will be working onsite in a gallery-adjacent studio space for a two-week Residency Exchange, May 13th – May 27th 2:30pm – 6pm most days. If you’d like to confirm if Jaffe is in the gallery, please call ahead. Visitors will have the opportunity to watch Jaffe at work in the studio, study her process, and use of materials and even contribute to the work. Her focus during the Residency Exchange will be completing one piece for Past, Present…, which will be continuously installed and added on to in the gallery during the residency period. This piece will involve participation from the public visiting the gallery as it progresses. Viewers can become collaborators, and create fragments to be used in future work displayed in the exhibition. In-Gallery Hours will be posted soon!
Workshop: Jaffe will be hosting a Shadow Puppet Workshop on May 21st from 6 PM – 9 PM. Register for this class through Eventbrite by clicking here.
