Valerie Jenkins

Region: Midwest

City / State: Detroit, MI

This body of work began with my prolonged observation and study of clear glass objects stacked and suspended in a window greenhouse that is attached to my studio and home. What emerged from my engagement with this “still life” was the opportunity to examine the precarious relationship between seeing and knowing.

Moving between painting, digital photography, and drawing, the resulting work is a hybrid form that suggests simultaneous realities, where appearances are fundamentally unstable and relational, and where reality is vulnerable to distortion both from within and without.

I’m interested in creating a visual dynamic that echoes life in the contemporary world, particularly how both the corporeal and the virtual contribute to our collective experience. The work functions as a trace of everyday experience, where such concerns as distance and proximity, ambiguity and contradiction, matter and its negation, are infused with imagination and wonder.