Description
Jenny Calivas was born in Maine and lives in Los Angeles, CA. In 2018, she earned her MFA in photography from The Yale School of Art where she was awarded the Ward Chaney Memorial Prize in performance. In 2016 she was a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work as been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, David Zwirner in New York City, LTD Los Angeles, Huxley Parlour in London, Buoy Gallery in Kittery, Maine and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland, Maine. Recent publications featuring her work include Speciwomen, Paper Journal, and HyperAllergic. She is a lecturer in Visual Arts at Princeton University and has also taught at Wesleyan University, Parsons School of Art and Design and the Borough of Manhattan Community College.
Jenny Calivas’ black and white images can unexpectedly taunt us, at once generous and withholding, still and active. Her pictures are part of photography’s long conversation about the tension between chance (the decisive moment) and control (the staged). Self-Portraits While Buried (2019 – 2021) features photographs where she has buried herself in the earth from which she sometimes seems to re-emerge as well. These pictures live in the realm of female experience and feminist making; the work suggests a new creation myth, a maternal purging or dissolving of the original form to make way for a new body.
