Birth Rehearsal
Issue 1
Artist Volumes Series
Jenny Calivas
New Poetics Publishing
English
Edited by Cristina Velásquez and Nechama Winston
Text by Katherine Hubbard and Jenny Calivas
Softcover
Edition of 300
16 pages
170 x 230 mm
2023
ISSN 29815320
Jenny Calivas’s Birth Rehearsal showcases work from several series: Self-Portrait While Buried, Birth Rehearsal, and Beginner as Diatom Scuzz. The artist works with analog processes and experimental darkroom techniques, prioritizing embodied ways of thinking and making. Calivas’s recent work consists of performative self-portraits as well as darkroom collages that investigate issues of agency and gender in relation to photography and the natural environment. The body we see here is a female body: exposed and vulnerable, yet empowered by the artist’s hand controlling the shutter while buried in the sand, and with the smearing of sand and saliva over an image on her photograms. Working with various types of self-portraits, Calivas talks about the body and the earth in ways that are spiritual, feminist, and ecological through a humorous and existential perspective. Her images are simultaneously generous and withholding, still and active. The work suggests a new creation myth, a purging or dissolving of the original form to make way for a new body.
(Source: https://www.newpoeticsoflabor.com/artist-volumes/p/jenny-calivas)
About the Artist
Jenny Calivas is an artist who lives between Brooklyn, NY and Los Angeles, CA. In 2018, she earned her MFA in Photography from The Yale School of Art where she was awarded the Ward Chaney Memorial Prize in performance. In 2016, she was a participant at The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She has exhibited at Light Work in Syracuse, NY; Justine Kurland’s Studio in Brooklyn, NY; David Zwirner in New York, NY; LTD Los Angeles; Huxley Parlour in London, UK, and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland, ME. Her work is in the permanent collections of Light Work, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Museum of Modern Art. Calivas is currently a lecturer in visual arts at Princeton University.
https://jennifercalivas.com/
(Source: https://www.newpoeticsoflabor.com/artists/jenny-calivas)
About the Publisher
New Poetics Publishing is an independent publishing house based between Bogotá and New York, founded by artists Nechama Winston and Cristina Velásquez. New Poetics Publishing is part of New Poetics of Labor, a research platform founded in 2017. New Poetics Publishing collaborates with emerging artists on contemporary and experimental approaches to photography in the book form. We disseminate diverse visual perspectives, narratives and aesthetics, seeking to feature underrepresented voices in the photographic discourse. Through photography we contribute to alternative modes of learning and thinking. New Poetics Publishing prioritizes producing high quality affordable books. Our approach to publishing allows us to work in close collaboration with artists from start to finish, with all design and editing done in-house. Production is done locally and by close friends.
https://www.newpoeticsoflabor.com/
(Source: https://www.newpoeticsoflabor.com/about-npp)
