Cluster

Reliquary for the Digital in Nine Key Words ο or 3. or □ / Organized Relationships / Jen Reich

By Jen Reich

 

If mass can neither be created nor destroyed, creation only occurs through Organization. How we organize creates interactions & reactions, which dictates the form or structure created.

“A body of matter cannot disappear completely. It only changes its form, condition, composition, color and other properties and turns into a different complex or elementary matter.”1

We exist as organizations of matter, experiences, emotion, continuously changing over time.

Organization within the body is defined as the conversion of an amorphous substance, such as a blood clot, into organized tissue. As the edges of a wound heal into a scar they become a different type of tissue, with a different density and surface, existing as a part of the same body as before, in the same location—so are we changed by interactions with the organizations of which we are made.

I create small forms, bodies, transformed gradually through shifting time and energy; they become tiny depictions of my own journey as well as those of the others’ I’ve brushed against, little microcosms of experience. And as you absorb them, they become part of your experience. It’s hard to live and simultaneously process the experiences of living life. These small forms dissolve into images and emotional responses, the collective matter you draw from in seeing, in processing as you live. The experience, the journey of these forms is defined in their aging process. These organizations I have assembled, my forms: they experience mimicry of the aging process the human body undergoes and perform correlations between the physical experiences. Through association I can reveal the inherent beauty, strength, and vulnerability in the various processes of aging and evolving in the captured moments in the lives of these forms.

Through associations with taste we may learn to identify ingredients in a dish by teasing apart the experience—isolating flavors—and through reflecting upon past experiences identify their origins. In seeing art, feeling, knowledge and the past combine, in teasing apart this combination we can identify the origins within ourselves, learning and deepening our understanding of ourselves, of and in time, and in space.

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Endnotes

  1. Nasīr al-Dīn al-Tūsī, 13th century AD.

  • Jen Reich

    Jen Reich is a sculptor leaning on the tools of multidisciplinarity as she turns her lens towards bringing the temporality and cyclical fluidity of our lives into focus. For years her work body related directly through mold making & casting, or focus on the body’s relationship to & in space, or making wearable pieces activating relationship of the body of the wearer & the work; now her work draws upon the relationships between the body and time, origins and cycles. In recent years Jen searched for a way to actively contribute to society, she found this in working for an abortion clinic, encountering visual & visceral experiences, as well as incredible grief, hope, and strength. She received her MFA from Cranbrook in 2013 and her BFA from Mass Art in 2003. Recent exhibitions include BPSI in Boston MA, Blanco in Munich, DE, Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, IL, Patterson-Appleton Center For The Visual Arts, Denton, TX. She is published in 20 Emerging Boston Artists 2010. Please find her work atjenreich.com and email her at .