What would happen if you fell into a wormhole? Would you find yourself being transported to a distant land? What would the process look like? Would it be a perpetual blackness? Or would colours and shapes explode and whiz by you? There’s no answer to those questions here, but staring at a sculpture by Los-Angeles based artist Jen Stark might offer you possible theories to those questions.
Jen Stark’s 3D sculptures can be likened to the experience of looking at a series of objects found in nature through a microscope in your junior high biology class…If you ingested copious amounts of hallucinogens before class. Her sculptures, which are predominately created with paper (although she has experimented with wood, metal and plexi sculpturing as well), collapse into themselves in dizzying, cyclical, jagged and colourful ways. They stretch out from a base, beckoning the audience into their limitless pinpointed centers; daring the viewer to decipher where a corner begins and ends.
The effect of Stark’s sculptures is that of overwhelming immersion into the symmetrical, rainbow-infused kaleidoscope. Such intricacies and tactile layering can offer an appearance of infinite sequences, infinite processes and infinite destinations. Staring at a piece by Jen Stark may cause spiritual epiphanies; they may suck an audience in – much like a wormhole – and spit them out into a baffling world of optical ecstasy.
Jen Stark also engages in 2D artwork – paintings, murals and billboards being a few of her mediums. These 2D creations, while unable to share the same intrusive and ever-stretching characteristics as Stark’s 3D sculptures, they still present chaotic, colourful landscapes, which seem to melt across the field onto which they are drawn.
It is no surprise that Stark was awarded the prestigious South Florida Cultural Consortium’s Visual and Media Artists Fellowship in 2008, as her meticulous, otherworldly approach is truly unique and offers a transcending experience of art. She has had solo exhibitions at the Cooper Cole Gallery in Toronto, Ontario; the Martha Otero Gallery in Los Angeles and the City Arts Center in Oklahoma City, among many others. Follow Jen Stark on Instagram @jenstark and visit her website (http://www.jenstark.com/) for more awe-inspiring work.
For more pictures, go to: http://thefineprintmagazine.com/profile-jen-stark/
Please contact Estelle Gervais by email for more information.
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