With roots in rural America’s deep midwest, Jen Neville’s artistic practice is interested in Progress (as related to Lauren Berlant’s Affect Theory, ideas of attachment) and “aesthetic spirit,” or the ideology of presence + truth. She exclusively engages in slow (often analog) processes, striving to cultivate a sense of surface. At its foundation, the work derives meaning from the chemical capacity to fix an image; the depth of emulsion grants access to realms beyond the immediate.

Recorded on black and white 35mm film, this body of work indulges in darkroom processes. Underneath a photo enlarger, silver gelatin paper is moved during the moment of exposure, committing misbehaviors of light, re-purposing the photographic negative and disregarding precision.

Photographs are stretched beyond their original dimension. The calculated blur embraces abstract representations of time, so that time may lose its economic dimension. The motif of motion, obliquely displayed in the presence of a “horizon,” embodies the idea of duration or distance. Temporal and concentrated impositions of light onto the emulsified surface take a formal approach to notions of intercession, utilizing light as material. Nuanced and inconspicuous details refuse totality; the work denies canons of an era plagued by expedient identity politics.

This period of work contends with dialectics of motion, dialectics of distance, and the ways in which a frame can hold an image. 

Jen Neville currently lives and works in Los Angeles.