Ghost Prairie // solo exhibition / CSPS Hall / Cedar Rapids, IA
2016
“In the history of American landscape painting, image-making was a tool to contain the unknowable and uncontrollable: the wilderness of a continent not yet wholly colonized. To create the image of the West was in some way to own the West—to tame the plains, the largeness of the world, through the act of picturing, a kind of ocular occupation.
Yet in Jen Harris’s Ghost Prairie, the landscape never coheres itself, assembles into a whole, a recognizable shape. It never smoothes itself for the eye into the reassuring flatness of two-dimensional representation. Instead, what we see is the continual refraction of the image, folding and unfolding, kaleidoscopic and dimensionally complex. The installation is a shimmering phantasmagoria, wheeling between the figurative and the abstract, light and dark, organic and geometric form. The prairie, or the memory of the prairie, is rendered in a series of modular cubes, ink paintings mounted on woodblocks, that at times appear to be spilling out their lush contents: soft pieces of pattern and bird wing, the spectral stalks of long-dead plants. The vanished landscape, the interlocking tiles of the phantom plains, is a puzzle with no solution. Ghostly, we cannot take possession of it.” — Anya Ventura (read full essay)
