You're Everything I Wish I Could Be, 2009

The Green Lantern Gallery presents In Lieu of Gifts, featuring new works by Los Angeles-based, artist Jenny Walters. For this solo presentation, Walters debuts photographs and video exploring the narrative impact of transformative life events, specifically the durability and mutability of personal identity and their aftermath.

A pervasive sense of feminine desire, vulnerability and desperation links a number of these pieces, but they are also marked by an attraction to universally theatrical gestures and scenarios that signal the complexities of relationships with oneself, others and the future. The installation explores the issues of aging, mortality and performance while presenting visual information that allows the viewer to recognize and share the inherent intimacy in failure. Constructing a sort of psychological anthropology via performance and the photo/video document, Walters recognizes that it is in our failures that we begin to see each other and ourselves and draw closer together. This point of power exchange, in all its manifestations and nuances, drives primal human connections. It is in the crumbling of personal mythologies that a deeper intimacy with her subjects and their possessions occurs.

Evoking a consciousness of nostalgia and absence, Walters' work probes the idea that identity often exists in a fluid state. It is in this investigation into stages of uncertainty--the doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self--that she so adeptly creates a visual experience of the uncanny or a sense of helplessness evoked by the anxiety of unknown emotions.

Walters' portraits are characterized by an intimacy and quiet involvement with the subjects and places she selects. While there is an innate awareness of the historical, aesthetic paradigms of portraiture native to her work, she subverts many of the expectations of the form by inserting intentional transgressions in her process. In her new work, she has chosen to construct and show images that capture the truth of unique moments as opposed to presenting a homogenous study over time.

Walters earned her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2004 with a focus in video and photography. She has exhibited her work in solo exhibitions, including Galeria Andre Kermer, Leipzig, Germany and has also been featured in group exhibitions at such venues as Vox Populi, Philadelphia; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; EAST International (a juried exhibition curated by Neo Rauch and Gerde Lybke) at Norwich Gallery, Norwich, England and Jen Bekman Gallery, New York. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

In conjunction with this exhibition Walters is also releasing a limited edition portfolio of photographs.

Dear members of the art community of Chicago,

We're making a zine entitled "It's Your Turn" to commemorate the closing of the Green Lantern Gallery, and the launch of many other new and awesome spaces in Chicago. We'd like to include some thoughts from people in the art communities in Chicago--memories of past experiences at the Green Lantern Gallery and other art spaces in Chicago, or responses to the prompts below:

Describe Chicago’s art community in six words or less:

What is the sound (or smell, or touch, etc.) of the Chicago art community?
What is your ideal art space / exhibition venue?
Where is the art world?
How do you feel about approaching spaces to show your work, host your band's show and whatnot?
How do Chicago’s art communities compare each other...and to those of other cities?

To be included in the zine, (and proposed as toasts on the day/evening of the party!) we need to recieve them by May 10, seriously.  Responses should be sent to Ms. Rachel Shine-- mintsuit@gmail.com.

If you have any other ideas for inclusion in the zine, email Young Joon at youngjkwak@gmail.com.