Parlor Pieces

video sculpture: pedestal, doll furniture, video, painting, cardboard life sized furniture with single channel video projection, 1997

Using minimal forms with decorative motifs, Gabrielle Jennings examines memory and longing through narrative. The story evokes moments between waking and dreaming. Different media are used (miniatures, pattern, painting, video) which allude to a narrator that is inconsistent, varied and multifaceted.

In Parlor Pieces, pattern becomes the ghost writer of stories that embrace the melancholy of remembrance. Precious, personal objects like childhood doll house furniture become the key to unlocking a nostalgia which is at once pensive and seductive. Using pattern from these objects signifies the fragile world, the delicate and elusive state of memory and desire.

In Garden, a butterfly breeding box for children is replicated in plexiglass and turned into a site for examining one’s own viewing habits. Minimal forms and white features mark this sculpture which employs black and white surveillance video in combination with a video featuring Monarch butterflies.

These migrating winged insects take the spotlight again in Catch and Release, a video sculpture that consists of a child sized cardboard house with a video monitor inside. The viewer is able to approach the house and look into the only window to watch images which use a minimalist framing device to both mimic and highlight camera movement and direct focus to a slightly creepy ‘tagging’ process.

Subtle connections between pieces are built into Jennings’ work. The piece Parlor Painting visually references Parlor Piece in its use of pattern while pointing towards Catch and Release with a miniature replication of the house. These visual signs are meant to overlap, call attention to the nature of memory and create a tension and a conversation between pieces.

Miniatures, butterflies, hand-made houses and furniture are icons that excite desire for the object. Through replicas of one another, pattern replaces the object and not only gives reference to the real, but takes on its form to become the real in a physical sense. The object of memory is replaced and becomes the thing remembered. Pattern and object fuse together and engage in a symbiotic relationship, taking turns in the role of narrator. Whether it be miniatures, pattern painting or video installation, the work references itself, pointing, giggling, inviting the viewer in for a story, a game, a play date. At times it is possible to see one’s own image literally within the work. This evocation of desire seen in real time recalls the function of memory: to examine oneself from the safety of the always, already present.

Written in collaboration with the artist by Maggie Miller.