Spotlight Artist

Jennifer Presant

Midwest
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Featured in New American Paintings

Artist Statement

With an artistic training in figurative realism and a background in graphic design, my paintings unite my interest in the psyche as expressed through the human form and a personal graphic aesthetic. Thematically, my paintings address the complexity of memory, by blurring the lines between recollection, projection, and reality. Each painting becomes a psychological landscape or waking dream, reinforcing the fluid relationships between time, memory and place. The projected image as object, and the notion of projection, is the most dominant visual metaphor pervading the compositions and gives my paintings the look of theater, video and installation art. By merging both real and fictitious images in these painted fictional documentaries, I explore the conflation of our media-saturated lives and our lived reality; we live among images and in many ways as images. Our memories of events have become distorted. With media today, we have grown accustomed to watching ourselves and living from a voyeuristic standpoint. With these paintings, the viewer's imagination plays an important role in the piece, while also being implicated in the voyeurism depicted.

Artist's Additional works

Works shared by the artist outside of their featured New American Paintings selections

Featured artwork
Featured artwork

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