Jennifer Bolande

Alexander and Bonin is pleased to announce the latest exhibition of works by New York artist Jennifer Bolande. Bolande has long been associated with post-photography, and thus with the erosion of boundaries between photography and other media. She has consistently worked in a poetic and subjective form of conceptualism which has manifested itself in preternatural objects and images.

The exhibition includes color photographs from the series Globe Sightings, an installation of paper sculptures from the series Map Folding Incidents, and culminates in Global Tower, a large-scale architectural sculpture. Global Tower, a stack of globes encased in glass alludes to architecture as well as the ground on which all buildings are sited. The sculpture follows the proportions and configurations of a display window the artist photographed in Montreal.

In the series Map Folding Incidents, Bolande returns the map to an unpredictable topology, crumpling the neat paper folds into capricious sculptural configurations, which appear to be in the process of forming themselves before us. The map is returned to a patterned terrain of paper facets that one could literally traverse by foot, only to destroy it in the process.

The series Globe Sightings began while Bolande was photographing windows around the city for her earlier photo-sculptures. She began to notice the frequency with which globes appeared in the windows of homes, offices, stores and schools. The varying distances from which they are photographed speak to the boundaries of public space and private property. In these tableaus of inner and outer space, miniature models of the earth float in the darkened space behind glass, like NASA's photographs of the planet
earth, at times blurring distinctions between model and actuality.

The works in this exhibition generate a field of intersecting narratives which repeat and expand upon many of Bolande's earlier themes and formal preoccupations; the play of 2 & 3-dimensions, and the literalization and reversal of photography's claims to be a window on the world. Her work, often commemorating something that has changed, here addresses shifts in our perception of the world. The word "global," now ubiquitous and applied to all manner of things, is given physical form in these works making visible a process that is happening in the imagination and bringing the global into the personal realm.

Exhibiting since 1982, with shows at Nature Morte and Metro Pictures in New York, and exhibitions in Europe, Canada, and Japan, Bolande's works are included in several permanent museum collections including Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm.