Artist Volumes Series, Issue 1, Fall 2023
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.
Contributing writer Katherine Hubbard writes in “The image unseen”:
“The oxygen, which is seemingly less and less available to Calivas as she sinks deeper into earthly material, bursts through the cable release as Calivas exchanges her own livelihood for that of the image…It is this same mouth with dehydrated lips and sandy saliva that draws air into the body despite the mud caked onto the face…The same mouth forming a smile across a lifetime, which defies how we actively feel, and whose likeness is formed repeatedly in sand on the surface of the photo paper…like a rotting jack-o’-lantern left outside…when the gourd’s smile slumps in on itself eventually revealing decay.”
ISSN: 2981-5320
All rights reserved.
©Jenny Calivas
Images are courtesy of the artist.
All works by Jenny Calivas.
Text by Katherine Hubbard and Jenny Calivas.
Quoted text by Anne Bogart.
Photo editor: Cristina Velásquez
Text editor: Nechama Winston
Design & Art Direction: Cristina Velásquez
Typesetting: Raleway
Printed in Medellin, Colombia by Taller Artes & Letras.
Edited in Colombia.
First edition / 300 copies
October 2023
** Please note the shipping / handling fee is from within the US. To process international shipments outside the US, please reach out to newpoeticsoflabor@gmail.com. **
Artist Volumes Series, Issue 1, Fall 2023
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.
Contributing writer Katherine Hubbard writes in “The image unseen”:
“The oxygen, which is seemingly less and less available to Calivas as she sinks deeper into earthly material, bursts through the cable release as Calivas exchanges her own livelihood for that of the image…It is this same mouth with dehydrated lips and sandy saliva that draws air into the body despite the mud caked onto the face…The same mouth forming a smile across a lifetime, which defies how we actively feel, and whose likeness is formed repeatedly in sand on the surface of the photo paper…like a rotting jack-o’-lantern left outside…when the gourd’s smile slumps in on itself eventually revealing decay.”
ISSN: 2981-5320
All rights reserved.
©Jenny Calivas
Images are courtesy of the artist.
All works by Jenny Calivas.
Text by Katherine Hubbard and Jenny Calivas.
Quoted text by Anne Bogart.
Photo editor: Cristina Velásquez
Text editor: Nechama Winston
Design & Art Direction: Cristina Velásquez
Typesetting: Raleway
Printed in Medellin, Colombia by Taller Artes & Letras.
Edited in Colombia.
First edition / 300 copies
October 2023
** Please note the shipping / handling fee is from within the US. To process international shipments outside the US, please reach out to newpoeticsoflabor@gmail.com. **
