March 8 – 31, 2017 | Matri-ART-y: Women’s’ March on Art!
In a civilization where more than 51% of the population is female, yet 96% of exhibition space is given to men, it’s time for a change. In honor of National Women’s History Month and in celebration of uniquely brilliant female perspective, Turner Carroll features important women artists all month. Artists include an international roster including Nina Tichava, Raphaelle Goethals, Hung Liu, Squeak Carnwath, Karen Yank, Jamie Brunson, Mavis McClure, Jenny Abell, Suzanne Sbarge, Holly Roberts, and Brenda Zappitell.
Opening Reception Friday, March 10, 2017 from 5 to 7pm
[n.b. that this event takes place in Santa Fe]
April 14 – 17, 2016 | Turner Carroll at the Dallas Art Fair
Located at the Fashion Industry Gallery, adjacent to the Dallas Museum of Art in the revitalized downtown arts district. Featuring new works by gallery artists Fausto Fernandez, Hung Liu, Squeak Carnwath, Drew Tal, Jamie Brunson, Rusty Scruby, Edward Lentsch, Wanxin Zhang, Suzanne Sbarge, Karen Yank, Scott Greene, Holly Roberts, and more! Fair hours are Friday and Saturday, April 15 and 16 respectively, from 11am to 7pm, and Sunday, April 17 from 12pm to 6pm, with an opening preview gala Thursday, April 14.
A link to the Dallas Art Fair is here.
Ba ba Birdy: Jenny Honnert Abell
In ancient Egyptian religion, the soul was conceived as being composed of separate parts. Upon one’s death, the ba, an animated component of the soul endowed with the qualities of the deceased, was permitted to leave the tomb of the dead in preparation for the next phase of the journey to the afterlife. The ba was often depicted in flight, as a human-headed bird, sometimes a falcon. Ba-like birds with human heads are a recurring theme in California-based artist Jenny Honnert Abell’s works. Her hybrid creatures are rendered through a combination of sewing and painting with collaged illustrations of old engravings culled from books. They rest on branches and perch atop the trunks of cut trees. Each of Abell’s hybrid forms has its own personality, and each is given a different face. “I’ve been studying ancient Egypt as a hobby of mine for several years,” Abell told Pasatiempo. “I’ll tell you a little about how the human-headed bird thing started, but it was before I knew what the ba was. I was working in a studio space that was pretty small at the time. I was doing mostly collage then, not a lot of applications of other materials. There’s always all this stuff lying around on my table. I’m pretty organized, but it’s a small space, and I’m tearing books apart and, there’s just piles of stuff. I noticed the torn off head of Raphael next to a bird body. It might have been lying on the body. I never intentionally went to make a human-headed bird. I just saw it, and it really resonated for me.” Abell’s exhibition Pretty, Peculiaropens at Turner Carroll Gallery on Friday, Oct. 16.
The show includes Abell’s large-scale panel works as well as small compositions created on book covers. The covers exhibit an array of surreal imagery, much of it rendered in relief by sewing and stuffing fabric into various shapes such as the tree branches that exist in some works, and the bodies of the birds (the heads are collaged). “I started the book covers in 2004,” she said. “It is a more prominent, popular body of work than the panels in general.”
Abell began to appreciate the covers of the antique books she was buying for her collage work. “I started to notice how lovely some of the covers were. At the same time, I wanted to come up with something I could do that was smaller, which would be less expensive and would be quicker to do.” Unlike her painted panels, the backgrounds of her book covers are left untouched, allowing the patina and texture of the old tomes to become part of the composition, which is dominated by a central figure: sometimes a human-headed bird, sometimes floral imagery, or more ambiguous, organic shapes with reaching, fingerlike tendrils. Abell set a goal for herself to do one book cover a day. “It was just kind of an exercise to teach me to be much more spontaneous and just lighten up a little bit because the work is intense. I never was able to stick to the one a day. There were a couple that came together pretty quick but some of them were still pretty labor intensive.”
There is a contradictory aspect to the imagery in Abell’s pieces, as evidenced in one called For Myself, a large painted panel Abell originally intended to keep to herself. In the work, the cancerous head of a human sits atop the squat, plain white form of a bird, the ugliness of his affliction at odds with the ornate, bejeweled branch on which he’s perched. “I want people to look at that piece and immediately think how beautiful it is. The jewels are really rich, and it’s all real high quality, good stuff. Then you’ve got this white, plain bird that’s got this diseased face. I think it’s beautiful, but what is the piece saying? You’ve got this bird that’s obviously dealing with this horrific situation, this face that kind of puts you off but then it’s on this gorgeous branch.”
Abell stresses the value of working with quality materials in her collage work, preferring the high-quality papers found in older books to the cheap glossy pages of magazines. “I never use magazines. The only thing I use magazines for are the eyes.” The materials used on the branch in For Myself are antique glass jewels. The branch itself is made from eight-ply rag board, stuffed with cotton and sewn around the edges, making it jump from the surface in relief. “All those jewels are sewed on, and it’s very dimensional. I would venture that the head was from a book from the late 1800s. It’s hand-colored, and the quality of the head is super fine. I made the bird, and it’s a pretty good integration; you can’t really tell where it’s joined. The bird is also stuffed, making it dimensional.”
Abell made a connection between personal experiences and the themes of her work when Turner Carroll Gallery staff asked her for an artist statement. Abell began the series in 2007 when she was dealing with depression. “It came up in conversation that they’re about escape,” she said. “I started to think about it, and I still hold to that now, but I was just doing them because, intuitively, they felt right to me.” Abell’s birds embody something that seems integral to the Egyptian ba: a spirit unfettered by bodily constraints but still connected to the world. “Every human I know wants to know what it’s like to fly, myself included. By putting a human head on the bird it allowed me to be able to fly away and still be human. I could be above it all, but still see it and interact.”
See Slideshow
Jenny Honnert Abell Article in Healdsburg Press Democrat
Jenny and her work are the subjects of a very nice and extensive article in the Healdsburg Press Democrat recently. Specifically, the article highlights Jenny’s work being commissioned by the Art in Embassies Program, and her trip to Senegal where the work will live in the new U.S. Embassy. The Art in Embassy program is a program of the U.S. Department of State and a “legacy of President John F. Kennedy’s administration, designed to promote national pride and cultural identity by displaying American art throughout the world.” The other artist selected for the initial Dakar program is the fabulous Nick Cave of Soundsuits fame.
A link to the article is here.
Jenny Honnert Abell Selected for the Art in Embassies Program
Jenny Abell received a great recognition recently, being selected for the Art in Embassies program for the U.S. Embassy in Dakar, Senegal. In addition to purchasing 10 of Jenny’s pieces for the Embassy, the State Department is sending Jenny to Senegal in December 2012 on a cultural experience program. All this culminates in an exhibition in 2013 in Dakar with the fabulous Nick Cave of Soundsuits fame.
Dec 7, 2011 | SCOPE Miami 2011 Wrap Up
Wow. We had an absolutely stellar fair this year at Scope Miami. Many works by Hung Liu, Eric Zener, Rusty Scruby, Kate Petley and Jenny Abell found collections, including two institutional collections. The atmosphere was electric at Scope this year with thousands of attendees and loads of press. The link to a blog mentioning us is here. Thanks, Miami!