Variations

Collaboration with Kate Foley, single channel video, music used with permission from Scott Hiltzik, 2007

Variations is a video made as an extension of the Figure/Ground paintings in which silhouettes have gestural significance. The video was made by showing choreographer Kate Foley, ten paintings from which to create a dance.  She then performed variations of the dance on a green screen stage (a symbolic replacement of the landscapes in the paintings).  The piece was then digitally composited, edited, and set to music generously provided by composer and musician Scott Hiltzik.

The art critic, Jan Tumlir wrote of the Figure/Ground series in an essay titled ‘Frieze’, 2007:
"…An understanding of how the body can be made to mean is being demonstrated in these images, on the part of the bodies themselves as well as those who represent them, but taken out of their framing context on the magazine page or filmic narrative, these meanings become ambiguous.
…When Jennings reduces the image of the body to a white silhouette, as she does here, it becomes a literal cipher, a single letter or character, excerpted from its place in the word or sentence…
…The body, configured in this way, strains toward meaningfulness in the most general sense while remaining empty of any particular meaning. It is “about” abstraction in its resistance to reading, a resistance that must nevertheless be made readable, but it is “of” abstraction in its attempt to articulate by other means than those we already have at our disposal…"