Jennifer Bolande

Her work focuses on thresholds, liminal and peripheral spaces, and transitional moments—states she enacts by the repetition, accumulation and recontextualization of found materials. She frequently selects cultural artifacts on the verge of obsolescence or in flux—and thus acquiring new meanings—and archives, studies and reframes them. Artforum critic Paula Marincola wrote, "Bolande's highly individualized amalgam of sculpture and photography proceeds obliquely but precisely toward an accumulation of possible meanings. She is a connoisseur of unlikely but evocative details, of subliminally perceived, fragmentary images and events." • Illustration — Jennifer Bolande, Milk Crown, cast porcelain, 2" high x 7" diameter with white glass plinth on 41" x 17" x 17" pedestal, 1987. Bolande's work belongs to the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), Centre Pompidou, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). She has exhibited at MOCA, the Whitney Museum, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and MAMCO, among others. In 2007, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is emerita professor at UCLA and is based in Los Angeles and Joshua Tree, California.

Jennifer Bolande studied at NSCAD University. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is fine-art photography, art of sculpture and installation art. Places of work recorded in the authority are Los Angeles and Joshua Tree. Employment is recorded with University of California, Los Angeles. Positions recorded include professor emeritus. Work by Jennifer Bolande is recorded in the collections of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. Distinctions recorded are Guggenheim Fellowship and New York Foundation for the Arts.

• Name — Jennifer Bolande • Born — 1957 • Birthplace — Cleveland, Ohio, United States • Known for — Assemblage, sculpture, photography, film, installation art • Education — NSCAD University • Movement — Post-conceptual • Awards — Guggenheim Fellowship, Andy Warhol Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, Tesuque Foundation • Website — Jennifer Bolande

Bolande was born in 1957 in Cleveland, Ohio. She earned a BFA from NSCAD University. After initially working in dance, choreography and drawing, she turned to found material from the media and urban landscape, influenced by the 1977 Artists Space exhibition, "Pictures." She received recognition for this work in the 1980s and 1990s through solo exhibitions at The Kitchen, Artists Space, Gallery Nature Morte and Metro Pictures in New York, and Margo Leavin in Los Angeles. Bolande's later solo exhibitions have taken place at MoMA PS1, John Gibson Gallery, Alexander and Bonin and Magenta Plains in New York, Pio Pico Gallery (Los Angeles), Fotohof (Salzburg), Kunstraum Munich and Kunsthalle Palazzo (Switzerland), among others. Her 2010 retrospective at INOVA (Institute of Visual Arts) traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia and the Cal State LA Luckman Gallery. A monograph, Jennifer Bolande, Landmarks, was published in conjunction with the retrospective. She was also featured in the inaugural Desert X biennial (2017) and a MoMA screening of two of her films in 2022.

• Illustration — Jennifer Bolande, Visible Distance/Second Sight, site-specific billboard installation, 2017, Coachella Valley, CA. Bolande reprised the plywood visual theme in her first public-art project, Plywood Curtains (2010), a series of installations presented in vacated storefronts throughout Los Angeles. Inviting both a double take and acknowledgment of an ongoing economic downturn in viewers, she hung drapery printed with the graphic image of plywood inside the empty windows, mimicking the familiar sight of boarded-up storefronts. The site-specific Desert X project, Visible Distance/Second Sight (2017), invited another double take that encapsulated Bolande's collapsing of images, the cinematic and embodied experience. It consisted of three double-sided highway billboards that reproduced her enlarged photographs of the distant San Jacinto, Santa Rosa and San Bernardino mountain ranges. They were placed and scaled in order to facilitate what critic Christopher Knight called a "fleeting, disconcerting moment" for drivers in which "the wordless pictures line up exactly with the approaching view."

Bolande's project "The Composition of Decomposition" (2018–20) offered a subtle elegy on newspapers and the news itself. It began with Image Tomb (2014), an examination of history as a vertical accumulation of layers, represented by a stack of New York Times newspapers through which she tunneled by cutting a deep rectangular channel to excavate a picture of skeletons below. She used the excised pieces to create the project's centerpiece, a film composed of roughly 400 pairs of side-by-side fragments ordered in their original sequence, which appeared and faded in a rhythmic flow set to a score of percussive found and synthesized sounds. Los Angeles Times critic Leah Ollman called it a "subtly provocative" new form—evoking found poetry and early modernist abstractions—that "reduced the Times to a confetti of elusive clues" revealing connections of unexpected depth. In the exhibition, "Persistence of Vision" (2023), Bolande presented photographs of patiently observed, impermanent moments (often interventions of light), near-topographic portraits of single white facial tissues ("Monoliths"), and plaster sculptures of iceberg- or cliff-like forms ("Drifts") that visually rhymed with the tissue images.