Jenna Bliss

Freedom can be felt on a long walk when you realize you’re hours from both your starting point and your destination.

I was taught to walk fast in the city, but I’m slower than google predicts. It’s just the pace I fall into when I’m distracted. The street isn’t what it used to be, teeming with life, but it’s still crowded and unpredictable. I see my reflection in vacant and occupied store windows but pretend I’m looking beyond myself, inside. Then I start to actually look.

These works are made up of super 8mm stills filmed over the past few years during various walks in New York. Preliminary materials for a motion picture, a critical history of Wall Street starting with 9/11 and unfolding in chapters.

Though it may be naive, it’s not necessarily nostalgic to use nearly abandoned technology as a weapon of resistance.

It’s hard to admit that enemies can shape our lives and our cities. Both because they are something to orientate ourselves in relation to but also because they aren’t so different from us after all. Destruction can ignite impudent development. Cities are everywhere and they are inflating toward an ever extending point of collapse.

But for now these tiny 8mm film stills have been cut from the reel, enlarged, exposed and framed, or transferred, layered and illuminated. A moment sliced from the line of history and frozen — here you can loiter for awhile.

Jenna Bliss, (*1984 in Yonkers, USA) lives and works in New York City, USA

Download Press Release (PDF)

Artforum Critics' Picks

Private Publics: Jenna Bliss, Mousse 71, Tidbits, by Alexandra Symons Sutcliffe

Contemporary Art Daily

Photography: kunst-dokumentation.com