Artist Interview: IN CONVERSATION WITH JENNIFER GUNLOCK
Mark Moore Fine Art
3 days left
Discover the captivating world of mixed media collages with artist Gunlock as she explores the tension between nature and architecture. Through her work, Gunlock captures the fleeting equilibrium between the two, and alludes to the impact of human actions on the environment. However, in her pieces, she also offers a hopeful vision of sustainability and co-existence between the natural and built world. Here are some highlights from our recent conversation with the artist.
"Gunlock offers a vision of a hopeful future in which the built environment is woven sustainably into the natural world."
-Al Grumet of Art Works for Change
"In her mixed media collages, Gunlock explores the restless intersection of nature and the built environment. She depicts trees with rugged branches and burly roots wrangling with residential facades, windows, gates and other architectural features. Gunlock captures a fleeting moment in this struggle, one in which nature and architecture seem to co-exist in a colorful equilibrium, if only for a moment. Gunlock alludes to historical patterns of overshoot, which are marked by excessive demand for natural resources, followed by eras of human decline and the slow recovery of forests and ecosystems. But in these works, Gunlock offers a vision of a hopeful future in which the built environment is woven sustainably into the natural world."
-Al Grumet of Art Works for Change
Jennifer Gunlock's work explores the relationships between the objects of nature and those imposed upon them by human activity. By layering photographs taken on her travels, decorative papers and drawing, she constructs tree-based forms which are awkwardly fused with architectural motifs. Each composition reflects a long passage of time in which buildings and trees stretch and crumble, each pushing against the other. The work is a commentary on humanity’s direct impact on the environment, as well as Earth’s interminable shapeshifting over the long history of its existence.
Based in Los Angeles, Gunlock has received an MFA at California State University, Long Beach in 2003. A 2022 recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, she has exhibited nationally and in local venues such as Sturt Haaga Gallery at Descanso Gardens, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Launch LA, and Angels Gate Cultural Center. She has been Artist in Residence at Cill Rialaig Project in Ireland; Playa in Summer Lake, Oregon; Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts in Saratoga, Wyoming; and at the Pajama Factory in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, among others. In 2014-15 Gunlock participated in “Fires of Change,” an NEA-funded collaboration between artists and scientists, to translate the social and ecological issues surrounding wildfire in the Southwest. Following a fire science bootcamp in the Grand Canyon, and a year to complete a project, a group exhibition opened at Coconino Center for the Arts in Flagstaff, Arizona in September 2015 and traveled to the University of Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson and 516 Arts in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Could you explain a little about your mediums and techniques?
When I travel, I photograph buildings, construction sites, tree roots and limbs, and I store them in my computer’s image library. I begin a work by printing images onto photocopy paper, cutting them up, and adhering them to the surface with acrylic medium. The composition then takes shape with rice papers, gesso washes, and colored pencil. As my practice is intuitive like process-painting, partial destruction of the composition sometimes occurs. The completed work is sealed with acrylic varnish.
Artist Photograph (Columbia River Gorge 2023)
How did you begin your art practice, and how did it evolve?
In graduate school I identified as an oil painter. I gesturally pushed paint around, which resulted in post-and-lintel and tree-like shapes. After school I grudgingly turned to collage as a solution to life without a painting studio. I then began taking my own photographs, which forced me to consciously investigate the compositions’ themes with more specificity. I endlessly explored the collision of the natural and built environments, which had me eventually acknowledge my environmental focus.
Artist Studio PLAYA Summer Lake OR (2023)
What is a primary influence in your work?
Growing up in Southern California, I witnessed over the decades this wildland being replaced with houses and strip malls, and concrete spreading like a virus. In the last decade alone I watched DTLA’s towers sprout upward and grow denser like weeds after a wet winter. Our dry climate, recurring droughts, and increase in wildfire superstorms are my immediate experiences pertaining to the global issue of climate change, and how that acceleration of the change is a direct result of human impact.
Artist Photograph (Downtown Los Angeles 2015)
How do residencies play a role in your practice?
The photos I take in the places I visit, and what I learn about these locations in regards to their natural and cultural histories, mythologies, or current ecological issues influence the next body of work I make. Following my 2019 residency in Ireland the "Backcountry" series was begun, which set my tree collages in a verdant Irish landscape. The series presents a fusion of the old with the new, of ancestors and spirits butted up against modern soulless technology and infrastructure.
Art Studio Cill Rialaig artist residency, Ireland
Talk about one of these pieces we see here.
Backcountry IX (2024) is a symbol of resilience and recovery, influenced by a trip to Oregon last summer. On a smoky day I was led by local friends to the Columbia River Gorge, an area hit by wildfire in 2017. Fire scars had blackened the bottoms of trees. With the smell of ripe blackberry jam in the air, I was pointed to plants that had sprouted from their protected roots and reaffirmed their place in the forest. It was a scene of life renewed, as we briefly ignored the orange sky above us.
Backcountry IX, 2024 / Mixed media paper collage and drawing on panel / 48 × 36 inches
