* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
Trained in photography, Jennifer Zwick works in a variety of media, including large-scale installations, wearable sculptures, painting, interactive video installation, printmaking, and photographic processes. She is particularly interested in optics, symmetry, humor, one-point-perspective, anxiety, repetition, repetition, and repetition.
Jennifer explains the work by saying, “My constructed-narrative photographs are nonlinear short stories. They focus on bizarrely adventurous young girls populating beautiful but uneasy worlds. To create these images, I draw from childhood fantasies and memories, then construct life-sized environments. By pushing these scenarios to an extreme conclusion, the girls become metaphors for our hyper-real childhood selves, where remembered emotions become stronger through time. I’ve been asked why I go to such lengths – that is, why not simply photoshop an image together? Why travel to the woods to build a bedroom, or build a full split-level set? My reason hinges on how integral the building process becomes. Because these sets are so elaborate, the idea is concretely conceived before any construction begins. But through the building process elements evolve in ways I’d never have planned. Accidental details take on a meaning of their own; new connections between objects can’t help but emerge when standing in an open bedroom in a darkening spring forest.”
Her artwork is included in Seattle’s King County Permanent Arts Collection, was featured three times on the cover of The Stranger, and was a 2018 Artist Trust Arts Innovator Award Finalist.
In addition to making art, she writes a song a day once every few years.
