PENUMBRA WORKSPACE PROGRAM | New York City-Based Artist | 2024
Jeanette Spicer
Image © Jeanette Spicer. Courtesy of the artist.
“I make photographs, mixed media and videos to grapple with the absence of lesbian photographers, the lesbian gaze, and the long history of patriarchal constructs that shape our ideas of the female presenting form, and the creation of images.
Female presenting individuals’ lives, history and image have been portrayed by men, for men, particularly nudes, for centuries. In certain countries, less than 100 years ago, women couldn’t draw other women nude, even in art school. Because my personal experience, and many others, as women, and as lesbians, is underrepresented, written out of history, and fragmented at best by society, I create my own narrative and visual language in this work. I take on the role of creating a new world where female presenting bodies roam freely, come in and out of the frame, and form their own, new narratives through abstraction and surrealism which lends itself to subversion and freedom.”
Jeanette Spicer makes photographs, creates performative videos, works with mixed media and is curious about photography’s limitations. Her work is about the experience of what it means to be for her as a lesbian, as a woman, to occupy a sexualized, objectified, and underrepresented personhood.
She received her MFA from Parsons The New School in 2013. She attended Vermont Studio Center, The Wassaic Project, and Benaco Arte in Italy, among other residencies. Her first monograph, Sea(see) was published in 2018 by Kris Graves Projects. Her second monograph, To the Ends of the Earth will be published in Fall of 2024 with GOST Books. She has shown her work in various exhibitions, and have had her photographs shown in some publications such as New York Times, New York Magazine, New Yorker, and Vogue. She is co-editor of a dyke publication WMN (2019-current), showcasing art and poetry by marginalized communities of lesbians.
jeanettespicer.com
SPONSORS
This program is supported by Henry Nias Foundation, Joy of Giving Something, The Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation, and Roz Leibowitz.
