JEN DENIKE
Jen Denike is an American artist based in New York whose work spans video, photography and performance, negotiating a distinctly feminine perspective on gender roles. A director of choreographed movements, her structuralist approach to time is grounded in the formal language of photography. Evoking cinematic archetypes, aesthetic cannons build a gravity of repetitive actions, forming a psychogeography of both real and imagined utopias with a reverence for nature and architecture that interchangeably function as containers of desire and places of intervention.
ABOUT THE WORK:
A young man rigorously rows a wooden boat through a swamp, the sound of creaking oars fill the frame as he intensely stares into the lens. The video's title Swing Low refers to the oral tradition of call and response work songs, the rower's repetitive physical labor mirrors the repetition and cannon of the unheard hymnal, the song itself remains absent.
"Back and forth the small boat lunged in sweaty motion, strength in the abyss, we remained fixed in the collective violence of memory, invincibly rowing, rowing into infinity.”
Swing Low, 2004. Single Channel video. TRT 2:55 minutes loops continuously. Edition of 3 with 1AP. Image courtesy of the artist, Central Fine, and signs and symbols.