Unseen Forces
January 11, 2008 - February 23, 2008
Southern Exposure (SoEx) presents four concurrent solo exhibitions and public projects by four Bay Area based artists: Chris Bell, Elaine Buckholtz, Bruce Tomb, and Jenifer Wofford.
Working within the context of questioning is artist Jenifer Wofford, whose sculptural installation and wall painting, Unseen Forces, installed in the rear gallery at Southern Exposure, persuades viewers to consider or re-consider the intent of a walk-through metal detector and it’s constant influence in our lives. Or, as Wofford states in reference to walk-through metal detectors, “It’s the dulling of our anxieties that gets me: how bland we allow these processes to pretend to be. [Yet,] I somehow maintain a little thrill of delight in re-imagining their purpose. After all, they’re thresholds.” Recipient of the 2007 SF Bay Guardian Goldie Award in Visual Arts, the Southern Exposure exhibition is Wofford’s first major solo show upon graduating with an MFA from Berkeley last year.
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essay about Jenifer Wofford
by Jessica Tully
In Jenifer Wofford’s first major solo work since completing her master of fine arts degree at the University of California, Berkeley, earlier this year, she offers to take her audience through one of the most contemporary liminal spaces of our time: the metal detector. Her fabrication and presentation of this mundane yet highly personal probing device invites the viewer to experience a different sort of panopticon outside the quick, efficient and undramatic method of our everyday passings.
In this work Wofford overrides the mere detection of metal with other mysterious tests far more interesting than whether the subject is packing heat, adorned with an inordinate number of bangles or even carrying one of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s “travel-size” metallic Bill of Rights. Wofford knows how often we are being watched and is most interested in surveillance that goes beyond the surface. Her new sculpture takes us where the usual phantom tollbooths don’t: inward. She is thrilled to re-imagine their purpose.
“Perhaps here—even for a second—we’re actually being transported to a parallel universe, and being measured against standards far more evolved than those of the modern world we’re living in,” Wofford suggests. She distinguishes the conventional mission of metal detectors and their numbing quest to alarm minders of anything, or anybody, different—metal or liquid—with her own use. Across the planet, the prevalence of metal detectors reinforces conformity to trusted norms and systems for security and social control—but not here. Instead, what appears is an open passage to divergence.
Disarming the concept of passing has always been important to Wofford. Her paintings, drawings, videos, performances and collaborations all treat unseen qualities of labor, women’s work and, above all, the role of the out-group, with graceful and generously iconic human forms. She brings an arrestingly beautiful use of light to each form in her employ. Her cultural production is never without a deftly lined underbelly of pointed humor, tricksterism and riddle-making. In her most recent series of paintings, Point of Departure, circa-1970s female nurses modeled after women in Wofford’s own family are engaged in dialogues with amorphous forces. Her human forms are depicted mid-gesture, with a certain air of professionalism—and disdain—evident in each face. They have dealt with these blobs before.
In Southern Exposure’s large rear gallery, Wofford’s combination of sculpture and explosive wall treatment invites us to accompany the artist on a journey in which she averts the ever-watchful eye of authority from monitoring us travelers, shoppers, students, concert-goers, defendants and immigrants. Instead we get the chance to explore and, thus, realize forgotten dreams.
The treasure detected by Wofford’s device lines a pathway of personal expansion, picking up where They leave off.
