{"id":37992,"date":"2017-09-20T22:10:20","date_gmt":"2017-09-21T04:10:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=37992"},"modified":"2025-11-04T17:33:17","modified_gmt":"2025-11-05T00:33:17","slug":"amy-jorgensen-crashes-the-patriarchal-party-at-nox-contemporary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/amy-jorgensen-crashes-the-patriarchal-party-at-nox-contemporary\/","title":{"rendered":"Amy Jorgensen Crashes the Patriarchal Party at Nox Contemporary"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cDinner Napkin No 1\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Things were going swimmingly in the Garden of Eden before a sinister serpent offered Eve, Earth\u2019s first woman, an apple. Though such a partaking was expressly off limits, Eve simply couldn\u2019t resist the seduction of the deliciously bright and crisp fruit. Letting her selfish desires overtake her, Eve\u2019s consumption of this forbidden fruit led to the downfall of all mankind.<\/h4>\n

Since its inception, this moral parable\u2019s aim has been to instruct us on keeping our lusts and desires in check. Still, this indiscretion is singularly focused on a woman, the actions and body upon which Western society has often projected its fears and insecurities. The apple too, has become an amorphous icon of this event, signaling contradictory notions of lust, health, and vitality. Artist Amy Jorgensen maintains a longstanding fascination with apples, which appear in many of her works. Whether she\u2019s bobbing for them, taking a bite of a bright red one, or demolishing one with a gun, for Jorgensen the apple is decidedly corporeal. Now, in her exhibition\u00a0Labor of Love<\/em>, currently on view at Nox Contemporary, Jorgensen once again explores the apple\u2019s iconic significance. The show comprises three sections \u2014 two sets of dinner napkins and a series of photographic prints from her ongoing series \u201cThe Body Archive\u201d \u2014 crafts a powerful commentary on the beauty, horror, and isolation of female identity, reminding us that \u201cthe self\u201d is discursive and ephemeral.<\/h4>\n

Women long have been defined by their link to the domestic sphere, with the preparation and serving of food at the core of traditional notions of femininity and motherhood. Jorgensen\u2019s art evidences her fascination with the politics of domesticity, which is rendered obvious by her use of hand-stitched linens. In her first grouping of works, she presents 13 large dinner napkins, stained by apples. In a defiant act, Jorgensen smashed apples with a hammer onto the napkins\u2019 surfaces and let the residue rot in the sun for days. The result is unsettling. The stains appear ambiguous in origin and can easily be mistaken for vomit or urine. Their putrid color marks a strong contrast to the pristine and delicate stitched napkins they have marred, and evoke the rigors and toils of \u201cwomen\u2019s work.\u201d Jorgensen\u2019s use of 13 napkins references Jesus and his 12 disciples, the 13 men present at the Last Supper. For Jorgensen, the napkins are material items that signify the women\u2019s labor which occurs behind the scenes. \u201cWhen you look at the image of the Last Supper, there are 13 men around the table and I wanted to shift the focus to women\u2019s work. What\u2019s happening behind that image; who is making the meal?\u201d she asks.<\/h4>\n

Indeed, Jorgensen\u2019s act of marking the napkin\u2019s surface with rotted apples is akin to smashing the patriarchy, which she describes as \u201crealized through mark-making and the residual staining and flesh of the fruit, the linen cloth alludes to the spiritual and corporeal body.\u201d These dinner-table accouterments contrast a delicate, ethereal quality with the wanton stains marking their surface. Indeed napkins and handkerchiefs are commonly used to conceal and remove fluids, rather than expose them. The use of pristine white to achieve such a purpose alludes to longstanding societal expectation of ideal womanhood as pure, unmarked, and virginal.<\/h4>\n

The ceremonial aspect of Jorgensen\u2019s napkins also references important works within the feminist canon. For one, Judy Chicago\u2019s \u201cDinner Party,\u201d the definitive symbol of First Wave Feminism\u2019s obsession with \u201ccore imagery.\u201d For later generations of feminist artists, Chicago\u2019s triangular dinner setting for 39 \u201cguests of honor\u201d has come to represent the constrictive visual language of feminist bodily symbolism: the piece has long been criticized for its reductionism, namely in the simplification of historical female heroines to their bodily counterparts. It\u2019s clear that for the generation of women who followed, the characterization of the feminine would be more discursive. Artists such as Mary Kelly, Barbara Kruger, and Adrian Piper grappled with the validity of crafting fluid definitions to begin with, choosing instead to analyze the external forces that shape female experience, rather than attempting to capture any notions of innate female essentialism. Here, Jorgensen\u2019s practice is most closely akin to Kelly\u2019s work. The two share a common desire to suggest rather than instruct, using the visual and the conceptual to evoke a sense of corporeal perception, while leaving open room for interpretation. Jorgensen, like Kelly, evidences in a gestalt way the various materials and substances of womanhood.<\/h4>\n
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\u201cBlood of Women 2\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

In a series of smaller napkins called the \u201cBlood of Women,\u201d Jorgensen uses her own blood and red wine to mark the surface of each geometric square. These squares are much smaller than the apple-stained napkins, evoking a tighter grid when viewed as a whole. In this series of geometric pairings of hemstitched linens, stained centers radiate outward from the middle, sometimes spilling over the carefully stitched frames. For Jorgensen, blood is a multifaceted symbol, evoking simultaneously the act of menstruation, violence, and labor (the proverbial blood, sweat and tears).<\/h4>\n

The final component of the exhibition is a series of brightly colored photographic prints from the ongoing series \u201cThe Body Archive.\u201d For this series, Jorgensen creates an experimental process in which a light sensitive emulsion is placed underneath her clothing. When exposed to light and heat, the camera-less emulsion captures the abstract marks compiled from her actions and movements throughout the day. After removing the emulsion from her skin, Jorgensen processes the images on 4\u201d x 5\u201d slide film, followed by a high-resolution drum scan. The result is an exquisitely rendered, colorful abstraction. Even lacking the context of the images\u2019 creation, viewers are likely to be captivated by the forms freckled on their surface. Viewing the mysterious gradations in the texture of these photographs, one can read a corporeal interpretation without knowing that they do in fact record and detect bodily activity.<\/h4>\n

\u201cWhat is interesting about the \u2018Body Archive\u2019 is that it eliminates perspective, allowing the body to author its own point of view,\u201d Jorgenson says. \u201cWhen you\u2019re looking through a camera, you\u2019re one layer removed from experience, so what I like about this process is that it relinquishes my control and hands it over to my chosen medium and my body.\u201d Here, the body rather than the mind becomes an author by eliminating and inverting the authorial gaze. Indeed, Jorgensen considers each part of the exhibition as both tactile artworks in their own right but also evidences or documentation of a past performance. One can readily detect the enigmatic power imbued in this process, which Jorgensen describes as \u201cbeautiful and grotesque at the same time.\u201d In\u00a0Labor of Love<\/em>, Jorgensen succeeds in crafting a discursive, complex and conceptually fluid exhibition, one that artfully explores the act of women using their own space to destroy a patriarchal structure and using art as a visualize resistance to that system.<\/h4>\n
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Body Archive 4<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cAmy Jorgensen: Labor of Love\u201d with \u201cJustin Watson [human],\u201d\u00a0Nox Contemporary<\/a>, Salt Lake City, through Nov. 10. Reception Oct. 20 6-9 p.m.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cDinner Napkin No 1\u201d Things were going swimmingly in the Garden of Eden before a sinister serpent offered Eve, Earth\u2019s first woman, an apple. Though such a partaking was expressly off limits, Eve simply couldn\u2019t resist the seduction of the deliciously bright and crisp fruit. Letting her selfish […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1534,"featured_media":37993,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,14],"tags":[529,100],"class_list":["post-37992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exhibition_reviews","category-visual_arts","tag-amy-jorgensen","tag-nox-contemporary"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/Amy-Jorgensen-Dinner-Napkin-No-1-800x800.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-30 18:36:25","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37992"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37992\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97709,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37992\/revisions\/97709"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}