Jennifer Amadeo-Holl
Conceived in Alaska and born in Philadelphia, my roots bridge the island of Puerto Rico and the peninsula of Cape Cod, the one formed by ancient volcanoes and the other nearly afresh by glacial drift. I was raised in a ceramics’ studio + how-to environment of letterpress poets, painters, sculptors, barn builders, barterers + experimenters in many realms. My imagery and love of language reach back to my childhood, and are rooted in a love of color and a fascination with faces, vessels, and hands and feet, which often work as architecture in my paintings. I create art as an act of communication and fellowship.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Earth Suits: Where do they begin and where do they end? And how does an invented image, a bit of reformulated matter, say anything at all to another human being? All sensory experience is an exercise in imagined content – we all see and live within and through an interpretation of “reality” - a “controlled hallucination.”1 And given that other sentient beings also survive and thrive through variations on such interpretive brain predictions, we must to some extent experience analogous sensory perceptions. Are we ever fully separate?
All my paintings are vehicles for such contemplation on the puzzles of existence, of nature and the processes of looking, language acquisition, and image recognition as tools to access the world, and, in the case of my figurative work (human and otherwise), for ponderings on life and death, and the physics of free will or the mechanics of fate.
Utilizing the complementarity of abstraction and representation, geometric forms may combine with organic, curious, and accidental shapes to make inferences to recognizable forms, while rendered objects fuse, morph, or sit juxtaposed with abstract shapes. I attempt to express that time feels both quick and deep, love eternal and fleeting, memory firm and faded, and the sublime present and remote.
We have evolved and discovered because we can think in irrational and creative ways and allow our minds to ramble the landscape of the imagined. My hope is to make tender, paradoxically harmonic paintings that, while perhaps not fully explicable, speak to these varieties of conscious experience. I hope they honor the biological beauty of life, and find form for something meaningful to another mind, in another Earth Suit.
Note: 1 Neuroscientists Anil Seth. 2022. from Sònia Hernández, “Reality is a controlled hallucination,” CCCBLAB interview, 22 November)
— Jennifer Amadeo-Holl
