Malia Jensen: Nearer Nature

Malia Jensen: Nearer Nature

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ISBN: 978-1-7355856-2-8

Malia Jensen: Nearer Nature February 5 – April 3, 2021

CRISTIN TIERNEY GALLERY 219 BOWERY, FLOOR 2, NEW YORK, NY 10002

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In 2019, Portland-based artist Malia Jensen carved six sculptures from livestock salt licks and installed them in carefully selected wild places across the state of Oregon. Each sculpture was carved to represent different parts of the body: a Brancusi-esque head, a breast, two hands, a stack of doughnuts (standing in for the stomach), and a foot. Taken together, they suggested a reclining figure laying across the state, creating a parable of interconnection. Over the following year, eighteen motion-triggered cameras at six sites monitored the sculptures and the surrounding landscape, recording not only wildlife but also the changing seasons and the dissolution of the carved salt. The evocatively “used” sculptural artifacts were cast in glass and exhibited alongside a video installation of Worth Your Salt at Cristin Tierney Gallery in the spring of 2021.

Using an intricate filing system and working closely with an editor, Jensen compiled the trove of wildlife footage into the six-hour video Worth Your Salt. Composed of thousands of clips captured by the trail cameras, the video is structured in quadrants, displaying multiple frames of sequential footage on each monitor, evoking the grid of closed-circuit surveillance.

Working with collaborators at the Yucca Valley Material Lab in January of 2020, the original salt sculptures were kiln-cast in semi-translucent white glass, preserving the effects of animal engagement and a year outdoors on their surfaces and forms. By commemorating the weathered human forms in glass, Jensen creates both an ode and cautionary tale, finding beauty in our vulnerability but peril in our inattention. The expansive video Worth Your Salt gives us a window into the ordinary life of the natural world and an immersive opportunity for contemplation and reflection.

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Westward thoughts in this eastern US gallery loomed like daydreams, conjuring visions of escape to what we often naively refer to as “a simpler life” (but is really a quieter one with fewer challenges and consequences— a problematic fantasy, that). In one reading of the familiar Bible story, Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt for looking back at evil Sodom as she and her family fled the city for more virtuous pastures and to spare themselves God’s wrath (during pandemic times, they would have been driving a U-Haul). I am reminded of this passage from Donna Haraway’s 2016 book, Staying with the Trouble: “Grief is a path to understanding entangled shared living and dying; human beings must grieve with, because we are in and of this fabric of undoing.”

– CHAR I TY CO LE MAN, AR TFO R UM ( MAY 20 21)

Worth Your Salt, 2020. HD video. 360 minutes.

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Field Report: Worth Your Salt

Human nature is animal nature, inseparable and interdependent. Within this incomprehensibly complex system, everything has a story. Roads that began as animal trails crisscross the landscape. Forests hum with energy like wiring in our walls. Salt carries data and instruction to our every cell, an essential neurotransmitter in human and animal bodies.

Worth Your Salt and this body of work began as an attempt to create a real and metaphoric space to consider the nuances which connect us to each other and the natural world. Setting the process of Nearer Nature Project outside of my studio required that I change my own patterns and test new paths.

Simply walking into innumerable unfamiliar spaces holding my arms at my sides, open and vulnerable, became part of the work.

Beginning in early 2019 with the carving and installation of six carved salt-lick sculptures and 18 motionactivated cameras across Oregon, relationships of all kinds became the focus of the project.

Action on the edge of the frame hints at the enormity of what we’re not seeing and functions as a subtle critique of surveillance. What else are we missing? The salt sculptures figure in roughly one-third of the footage, functioning as lure for both animals and human viewers.

The 6-hour video serves as a window into the mundane and beautiful daily life of the natural world, connecting the viewer to a private place.

After the initial 5-hour edit of Worth Your Salt was complete, the video was installed in 12 non-art venues within the communities where filming took place. After gathering additional footage over the winter, my editor Ben Mercer and I created the final 6-hour version for gallery exhibition on three monitors.

The edition of kiln-cast glass sculptures wasn’t initially planned but became inevitable as I watched the decaying beauty of the eroding salt sculptures.

I was fortunate to begin the casting process in January 2020, working in collaboration with the Yucca Valley Materials Lab just before the pandemic forced us into isolation. The subdued and translucent glass artifacts remain as testament to the fragility of human constructions and the endurance of the natural world, marking traces that describe an inscrutable and ongoing dialogue.

- MALI A JE NSE N

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The salt licks were carved into a number of forms, some, such as a plate of donuts, recall the domestic and mundane, while others shaped as a hand or a breast invoke tender, life-nurturing figures. When placed in this context, one salt lick carved in the shape of Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse evokes the relationship between humanity’s aspirations of beauty and nature’s innate mastery of it.

– WALLACE LUDEL, THE ART NEWSPAPER (FEBRUARY 2021)

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The first and most important decision I made was to build the video into a grid. There’s an intersection of the mundane and the exceptional and setting the footage into quadrants was crucial to invoking the ubiquity of surveillance but also to literally keep the piece moving. I think the visually rhyming quartet of frames helps locate the beauty of the imagery and make it harder to dismiss. Your eyes flicker over it looking for some small action even during the slow parts.

— MAL IA J EN SEN

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I really do believe that good art has a function for humans, but it’s nice to see it having a still truer function for these beasts. For thousands of centuries, we’ve been messing with their nature. It seems only fair to let them mess with our culture, and really get something out of it.”

— BLAKE GOPNIK, THE DAILY PIC (MARCH 2021)

Humans are specifically not the protagonists in this work. That’s actually part of the point, to not center ourselves so much. Aside from the fragmented female form, which the animals are invited to consume, humans are absent. The occasional airplane sound becomes a discordant invader. I’m inviting the viewer into the wild space, via the surveillance cameras, and hoping they lose themselves, literally.

— MALI A JE NSE N

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Malia Jensen: Nearer Nature February 5 – April 3, 2021

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The cast glass sculptures weren’t planned but at a certain point when I was checking the cameras in Nehalem, I was actually taken aback by how beautiful the hand offering the plum had become. The coastal air had weathering it into a fragile, thin-fingered ode to human vulnerability, perfect for the metaphoric associations of glass.

— MALI A JE NSE N

Hand (with Plum), 2020. kiln-cast glass, etching ink, concrete, steel. 8 ½ x 16 x 10 ½ inches (21.6 x 40.6 x 26.7 cm).

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Head (for Brancusi), 2020. kiln-cast glass, etching ink, mahogany, maple butcher-block remnant.

11 ½ x 12 x 15 ½ inches (29.2 x 30.5 x 39.4 cm).

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Breast, 2020. kiln-cast glass, etching ink, reclaimed fir.

7 3/4 x 14 x 14 inches (19.7 x 35.6 x 35.6 cm).

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Donuts, 2020. kiln-cast glass, etching ink, reclaimed fir, walnut.

13 x 16 ½ x 10 ½ inches (33 x 41.9 x 26.7 cm).

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Foot, 2020. kiln-cast glass, etching ink, white oak, reclaimed fir.

8 x 13 ½ x 11 ½ inches (20.3 x 34.3 x 29.2 cm).

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Malia Jensen (b.1966, Honolulu, HI) is a Portland-based artist known primarily for her work in sculpture and video. Jensen draws inspiration from the natural world and the complex relationships we negotiate within it.

Her technically accomplished work marries the tactile authority of the hand-made with complex psychological narratives and a genuine quest for harmony and understanding. She has exhibited at The Schneider Museum of Art, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Tacoma Art Museum, Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, Holter Museum of Art, Portland Art Museum, and Mesa Arts Center.

Her work can be found in many public and private collections nationally and throughout the Northwest, including the Portland Art Museum, Schneider Museum of Art, 21C Museum & Hotels, JPMorgan Chase Art Collection, and Jordan D. Schnitzer Family Foundation.

She has been Artist in Residence at the Headland Center for the Arts, Ucross Foundation, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Yucca Valley Materials Lab and the Portland Garment Factory. Jensen has been a visiting artist at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Whitman College, and Massachusetts College of Art and Design and has mentored students at Oregon College of Arts and Crafts and Pacific Northwest College of Art. Nearer Nature received support from the Creative Heights Initiative of the Oregon Community Foundation. Jensen has a BFA, ’89, from the Pacific Northwest College of Art.

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Photography credits: John Muggenborg – 4-5, 7, 32-33, 56-57 Lauren Shimel – 37, 41, 46-47, 55

Cristin Tierney Gallery 219 Bowery, Floor 2 New York, NY 10002 212.594.0550 www.cristintierney.com