ESSAYS

Jen P. Harris: Conversations
By Carina Evangelista

This essay was originally published in the exhibition brochure for the solo exhibition, Conversations, at the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, December 4, 2009 – March 21, 2010.

LOVE – a short word with incredible variety of meaning, intention, complexity, power, and iconography. It’s on T-shirts, shopping bags, license plates, and postage stamps. It sits on city squares or museum gardens in large, colorful Robert Indiana letter sculptures, even translated in Hebrew in its version in Israel. It’s carved on trees or tattooed on napes, limbs, or backs. It’s spelled out in rhinestone- or, I beg your pardon, diamond-studded bling. It is blind. It is fickle. It’s a pleasure. It’s a pain. It is even trite.

Its ambit is such that it is at the heart of parables, short stories, novels, songs, movies, soap operas, grand opera, advertising strategies, tabloid fodder, nationalist fervor, liberation theology, and text messages. It eases the pain of birth and heightens the pain of death. It can be the incriminating motive in murders. Man, can it be so deep and heavy and so trite and fluffy.

Well, Jen P. Harris paints it. One might say she has the nerve to do so. But she also has the humor, introspection, flight of fancy, political coolness, and philosophical curiosity to do so. She paints it in a gamut of incarnations and ambiguities, with a register that ranges from observation and interpretation to reserve, indulgence, caricature, and even cryptology.

In the American Kiss series, Harris “reinterprets the familiar Hollywood image of romance, presenting couples in a cinematic light.”1 Here velvety blue in full moonlight; there tart between the chartreuse of the grassy knoll and the lavender sky; and gunmetal blue in the breezy mist of the sea with the halo glow of the salmon pink of a big, fat sunset in yet another. Each one is the setting for just the perfect moment for a languid embrace, a kiss, sweet nothings. The element of kitsch announces itself with one visual sweep of these. They could be pulp fiction covers, light romance film stills, or the album cover for a record that might include songs with titles like “Now and Forever.”

But closer scrutiny reveals something else. The couples are androgynous or queer; and Harris employs what she describes as “a skewed gravitational and perspectival scheme, along with an obscuring of the physical boundaries and features of the body” in order to illustrate “the psychosomatic aspects of human intimacy.” By both embracing and transforming familiar “notions of love and romance,” Harris continues the long tradition of figuration in painting through her ongoing “exploration of the representation of interacting figures in pictorial space.” But by the very act of placing queer couples in this long tradition, she does something else. She posits the silhouettes of the physical reality of love between two individuals, regardless of their gender. The subtext is: Indeed, different, yet no more different than that love in pulp fiction, light romance film, or syrupy love song. In short, heterosexuals do not have monopoly over love or romance, which in fact is the shared affinity between very different sexual orientations.

Conversation is a more cryptic series that features couples of mirrored images of the same person to explore the all but too real mystery or wonder of “the self and other.”2 Harris notes, “I’m interested in the evolution of identity in relation to the intricacies of human relationships. My pictures of interacting figures collapse binary notions about gender and sexuality and challenge expectations about culturally familiar imagery and figurative painting.” Extracting figures from different magazine photographs of the same model, Harris considers her thinking “about reflection, opposition, attraction, doubt, and the illusory nature of a unified self.” These portraits could be read from different angles: twins, the doppelganger, the split personality or the ruptured self, or vanity and self-love. The dissonances are as pronounced as the psychic possibilities are complex but real.

Two paintings, each featuring a man holding a baby, are interior scenes, this time positing yet another possibility: that of men being parents. There is dissonance, too, in that like the other paintings, Harris uses the same method she confesses to owe to Surrealism, in conjoining figures from different sources. Her raw materials include “photographs found in magazines, on the Internet, or in my digital camera” so that the paintings are “composites, sometimes replete with spatial and conceptual paradox.”3 The interiors are urbane and the men depicted look cosmopolitan. They’re not shown with either male or female partner, but it is understandable if a viewer hazards a reading that the implicit subject matter here is the unwarranted stigma placed on, and disproportionate furor about, gay couples raising children. There is something cool in the grays of Yellow Rose and the minimalist feel of Waiting. But they are each, as a matter of fact, simply a man holding a child. One child stares out directly from the canvas, holding in its gaze whatever uttered or repressed judgment the viewer might make.

Finally, Untitled (Red Shirt), seems to be that small yet powerful portrait of love. Surreal still in that the head of one of the figures is nowhere in sight yet the tight embrace says it all. The solarized visual effect heightens the orange and the red, making these warm tones emerge from the sooty background. Harris paints from found images that exist in the fictional world of fashion and in the real world to create tableaux, landscapes, and interiors that trigger multiple narratives. She paints love in its quirky, sometimes obvious and sometimes obscure permutations, for the love of painting, tipping her hat to the great masters of figure painting and candidly contributing to, or expanding, the conversations among the many examples of portraiture. LOVE. It is timeless. It is surreal. It is real. It is also, in Harris’s paintings, an inconclusive comment, a study, a possibility, and a question – in short, quite contemporary.

- Carina Evangelista
Gretchen Hupfel Curator of Contemporary Art

1 Jen P. Harris, Exhibition Statement for American Kiss at The College of New Rochelle, August 2009. All subsequent quotes regarding the American Kiss series are from this statement.
2 Harris, Exhibition Statement for Conversations, August 2009. All subsequent quotes regarding the Conversations series are from this statement.
3 Harris, Artist Statement, August 2008.