Artist

Artist

Bio

Jennifer Trask attended Massachusetts College of Art completing her BFA in Metalsmithing in 1993 and later graduated the State University of NY at New Paltz with an MFA in 1997. She remains in the Hudson valley area where she is a full time studio artist.

Examples of Trask’s work can be found in many public collections including the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, AR; and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. In 2008 Trask was awarded the Peter S. Reed Foundation Individual Artist Grant.
Trask’s work has been cited in many books and periodicals including W, The New Yorker, Contemporary Crafts, the Lark Books series, Metalsmith Magazine, American Craft and The Sunday Boston Globe Arts section, among others.

Recently Trask created a wall installation for an invitational exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design in NY. ‘Intrinsecus’ employs found materials like bone, wood, and antlers referring to the Dutch tradition of Vanitas and at the same time addressing the traditional practice of isolating examples/ideals of beauty stylization of nature, "in effect a death of the real, the imperfect, the individual."

TraskResume pdf

Artist Statements

Ves·tige
1.
a mark, trace, or visible evidence of something that is no longer present or in existence: A few columns were the last vestiges of a Greek temple.
2.
a surviving evidence or remainder of some condition, practice, etc.: These superstitions are vestiges of an ancient religion.
3.
a very slight trace or amount of something: Not a vestige remains of the former elegance of the house.
Biology . a degenerate or imperfectly developed organ or structure that has little or no utility, but that in an earlier stage of the individual or in preceding evolutionary forms of the organism performed a useful function.
5.
Archaic . a footprint; track.

Origin:  1535–45; < Middle French < Latin vestīgium footprint

It's hard to say exactly where this body of work began. My curiosity about the intrinsic nature of things, of materials and my interest in biology is paramount. In summary, many sources, Wilson's Theory of Biophilia, Darwin's sense of the sublime, BioArt and Botany and my own visceral response to the materials informed my process. While making this group of objects I had a question in the back of my mind, like a mantra, "what is written in our bones?" meaning, what desires, ideals, motivations do we carry silently?
In this case, ideals of beauty, our desire to manipulate, or perfect natural forms.
In the words of BioArtist George Gessert, 'Our ornamental plants, pets, sporting animals, and spice plants constitute a vast genetic art, or art involving DNA, in which aesthetic qualities determine survival…Very quietly hybridizers have become major interpreters of nature, producing organisms that are simultaneously beings and "images."'
Intrinsecus(2010) initially addressed the traditional museum practice of isolating ideal examples of natural beauty, and in effect a death of the real, the imperfect, the individual. The cultivated notion of nature overshadows the authentic.
The new wall pieces, Abundant Uselessness and Still Life still point to a human curatorial oversight of the evolution of our environment and its inhabitants for several millennia from outside the museum walls.
Still Life is a curatorial effort trying to pass for 'natural,' serving as a warning of the hollowness and brevity of earthly pleasures. The painting here is disintegrating, the exotics have all but vanished. What we now consider weeds(though not long ago they too were cultivated as ornamental plants) burgeon forth from the canvas and the wooden foliate structure of the frame. The Tulip, and Chrysanthemum, the Nest, Pearls and Keys are what one might have found in the original.
Chrysanthemums are an example of an ornamental that has been cultivated for over 2000 years in China and Japan. For this work I chose the form of the Japanese hybrids because they are the most animated, almost grotesque, shaped blooms. As a gardener myself, I get a thrill from such purposeless, strange beauty.
“Certain kinds of uselessness free our minds …the wonder of things in themselves confirms the goodness of being….One of the great unacknowledged forces of domestication today may be a hunger for abundant uselessness.” (G.G. 30)

Perhaps that feeling of wonder has to do with the otherness, the seemingly wild and everything not human, and not truly 'natural' while still under control. Though the tameness is an illusion. Recently we have learned that genetically altered, domesticated plants are far from harmless. Our appetite may have consequences we are yet to see.

The wearable pieces combine found materials, delicately carved florals with rough fragments of skull, teeth or antler forming an uneasy ornamental idiom. This aggregate of visceral and intellectual, raw and refined, drapes the shoulders, in nearly direct contact with the collarbones of the wearer. The re-appropriated floral motifs seem an incongruous remembrance, a grasping at permanence in a material that reinforces the reality of impermanence.
Neither clearly baneful nor benign, these objects are intended to mirror our complex relationship to our own internal nature(s), and the peculiar concept of dominion over intrinsic nature, or wildness by engineering a domesticated, ornamental nature.
Work Cited:
Green Light: toward and art of evolution/George Gessert.
MIT Press 2010

Random House Dictionary, Random House, Inc. 2011

Embodiment

What do we carry with us in our bones? Literally, and metaphorically?
Used to express definitive physical sensation and emotional sentiment (e.g. ‘bone weary’), bone is considered the absolute reductive essence of our physical selves. Bones linger, incorporating evidence of what we ate, how we worked, injuries, illnesses, and environmental conditions during a given lifetime. Lead, copper and iron, among other metals, bind to our bones as obscure mementos of our experiences.

What if those amalgams were to flourish and grow?
What would we see if we could view concepts and ideals, not just the verifiable physicality?

My process is a strange dance between the factual, or scientifically based research and the associative, or intuitive and non-verbal. As I move between the two places, factual and intuitive, internal and external, the results are cross-species hybrids that embody a peculiar romanticized vision of the natural world that betray a very human concept of separateness, of dominion over nature.
Looking deeper still, we see a measure of the unanticipated, in traces of internalized abstract experiences and ideals.

Implicit and explicit.
Internal and external.

Unnatural Histories: Flourish

My recent body of work from 2007, Unnatural Histories, delved into our precarious, at times, contentious, relationship with nature. We admire it, we attempt to collect, contain, and regulate it. Yet somehow we see ourselves as separate from it, beyond its reach and influence. In these objects the rift is visible in vines refusing containment, growth that confounds expectations. Branches sprout blossoms that return your gaze. Ornamental frameworks evolve into tendrils. Deliberate arrangements of flora and fauna, mineral and vegetal, ornamental and intrinsic, coalesce as hybrids that refer to the remarkable ability of nature to adapt and evolve in any circumstance. Down to the bone: Used literally to express definitive physical sensation and emotional sentiment, (e.g.: “feel it in my bones” or “bone weary”) bone is considered the absolute reductive essence of our physical selves. Bones linger, sometimes discovered centuries later. While bones seem permanent, they evolve like any cell with an assigned function, bone will break down and re-form, and incorporate evidence of what we ate, how we worked, injuries, traumas, illnesses, and environmental conditions during our lifetime. Lead, copper and iron, among other metals, bind to our bones as obscure mementos of our experiences. What if these amalgams were to flourish and blur physical boundaries? My imagery is derived from my examination of the structures of plant and animal life, from the plainly visible down to microscopic patterns of growth in nature. What I found was a system of rigid elemental principles with a remarkably vast potential for invention and adaptation, that also lends itself to powerful visual metaphors. Each of the pieces fit into one of three powers of magnitude; hand sized (10-1), cellular(10-5 to 10-8), or atomic scale(10-10). The results are oddly metaphoric, unnatural histories, that embody both a peculiar passion for, and contentious relationship with, nature itself. My hope is that in a moment of visceral delight, or simply curiosity perhaps one might reclaim a sense of wonder, as to the purpose of such meticulous arrangements.

Flourish, from 2008, is a continuation of this theme. In this second chapter, the hybrids are not just cross-species, but cross discipline as well. Flora and fauna thrive and outgrow containment metaphorically and literally. The jewelry object is an outgrowth of the painting and reaches past the two dimensional plane. The ornament extends beyond the wearable object and into the picture plane, stones are set directly into the paintings and frames themselves.

These are portraits of unintended cultivars. While neither clearly baneful nor benign, the results are oddly metaphoric. Branches bear fruit of bone and iron. Bones house seeds and grow leaves. The paintings and frames embody a peculiar romanticized vision of nature at the same time betray a very human passion to possess nature itself. My hope is that in a moment of visceral delight, or simply curiosity perhaps one might reclaim a sense of wonder, as to the purpose of such meticulous arrangements.

*** The bone and pre-ban ivory is found in my rural environment, or purchased in flea markets, then altered by carving or inlay. The gold or palladium frameworks are made from recycled material only.