Jingdezhen International Studio invited the Residency artist, Janna Longacre, she will present a lecture titled: "Seeing Thinking Reframing " on Wednesday, May 1st, at Ceramic Art Avenue Flagship Store 2nd-floor lecture hall at 19:00. This lecture is an overview of her unique background and influences essential to her work as an artist.
The degradation of life brought by consumer culture makes market to the overflowing popular culture, while the separate culture is ignored by the market. But art doesn’t belong to consumer culture forms. If we judge the current art market situation from a political perspective, art politics is in crisis.
Janna Longacre grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania, USA. Her Mennonite father and Catholic mother both had a key education in her growth and creation. In such a environment, the cultural differences between religious sects always affect her childhood.
The daily practice of traditional handicraft techniques is the most impressive part of Janna's childhood memory. With the studying of craft techniques in school and the popularization of philosophical in the local area, Janna's rudiment of exploring the outer world is gradually arisen. The feat of crossing the African continent in 1973-74 has left an indelible mark on her later works.
Having traveled and worked in 43 countries, Janna Longacre also has multiple roles as a teacher, a community organizer, an artist and writer, an exhibition curator and a guest speaker.
In order to distinguish these roles, Janna built a database with her creative language. The presentation of each work is composed of elements in the database.
Janna thinks, the presentation of the work should be assembled according to the specific site. It is intended to communicate with the audience's perception and provide a way to generate new ideas in terms of conditions, materials, environment or space.
The first consideration of creation is the spatial position of the exhibition. Janna tries to use writing, painting, and photographing to record her daily observations, and to imagine things she has never touched before.
I take photos of the exhibition space, write and draw the content that can be revised, and finally determine the title of the work, complete the dialogue between my work and myself
In the combination of installations, some are precision processed materials, some are antiques with a long history, and some materials’ addition implies existentialism. For Janna, the whole process of creation is the splicing, fusion and overlapping of different pigments on the paper. By trying the unforeseen possibilities, she integrates the interaction between light and shadow into her works.
The damaged structure will also be used to decorate the complete body. Each frame is an abstract narrative with Janna as the subject, which guides the audience to follow her main line to find their own viewpoint.
Material is the carrier of my writing, it guides the audience to participate in it, interact with it, and consider the extended meaning of the content of the work.
Each work is endowed with multiple meanings. Carefully constructed objects will be combined with random things. What looks like a magic stroke is actually the deconstruction and reorganization of strict elements.
At the end of the exhibition, the temporary installation was removed, and everything went back to its original appearance. What we really leave behind are the photo records of the works and the impression left by the communication between the audience and the material itself.