Hermits Hollow
Jennifer Gunlock
30” x 22” Mixed media on paper
Watch Tower
Jennifer Gunlock
22” x 30” Mixed Media on paper
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Based in Los Angeles, Jennifer Gunlock is a traveler who imbeds her wanderings into the artmaking process. Greatly inspired by a recent photographic trip to New Orleans, a majority of the drawings completed this past year reveal the city’s gnarled oaks, cemetery crypts and iron gates. A summer 2010 residency at the Pajama Factory in Pennsylvania saw the incorporation of the region’s moss-covered slate rock into her pieces as well as a new venture into digital collage.
Jennifer has earned a BA at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona followed by an MFA at California State University, Long Beach in 2003. A current member of the Los Angeles Art Association, she has exhibited in such venues as Acuna Hansen Gallery, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Angels Gate Cultural Center, and Orange County Center for Contemporary Art.
These mixed media drawings demonstrate a fascination with the relationships between living beings and those of human imposition. With the application of photo transfers, tonal papers, and drawing media onto rag paper or panel, tree-based figures are constructed, whose bodies are awkwardly fused with metal gates, antennas, stone, and other human-derived objects.
Each of these tree-forms is an ancient, sentient thing whose lifespan evokes the rise of fall of civilizations and the forests they occupy. A people enters a forest, clears it, and builds upon it. The village grows into a mighty city, perhaps an empire, and eventually, inevitably, the people abandons its city, and the civilization dies. As their great monuments crumble into ruin, the forest slowly encroaches and reclaims its right for dominance. The ancient trees and ruin bump up and press against each other, causing tension and ultimately fusion. The result is a forest of hybrid beings, comprised of metal, stone and branch. -
As Seen During:
- Here be Monsters