JEN MAZZA
BIOGRAPHY
Jen Mazza (born 1972, Washington D.C.) is a New York based artist who makes paintings and teaches at Parsons School of Design and the Pratt Institute. Her collaborative teaching integrates reading, artmaking and research across a range of disciplines, often focused on close visual analysis and problem-solving. She and her co-teacher, artist Dylan Gauthier have recently contributed a chapter to the book “Teaching Artistic Research” (De Gruyter, ed. Ruth Mateus-Berr and Richard Jochum PhD MFA). And in another collaboration of word and image, selected paintings appear alongside poems by Sampson Starkweather in his newest chapbook “A Week in Late Capitalism / Ancient Capitalistic Proverbs” just released by Blush. Most recently Mazza’s work was on view in her—covid shuttered—solo exhibition “Attending to Particulars” at Tibor de Nagy Gallery. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, Art News, and Hyperallergic.
STATEMENT
There is a truth revealing faculty to attention, it rewards us with the knowledge of other people and the world, and works of art, in turn, help us to learn how to pay better attention to the world.
I was caught by a comment made by the artist Kadar Attia last fall. Attia said “we have lost the notion of us,” lost the sense that we are a community of the living and the dead. I feel we have lost the ability to recognize something about ourselves and others and also lost track of a moment when the constitution of the self was in the gaze of others. Murdoch thought both art and love de-center the self—“gazing is the master image” she writes. I believe that what we seek to see is hidden in plain sight, so careful attention is needed to slow and complicate how we look. My recent paintings, of literal mirrors and of objects constituted otherwise (by classification, by excision, and objects constituted between genres) aim to regain that lost notion, the notion of us, by attending to objects. Changing the present requires taking up the materials of our past differently, reappropriating them towards the formulation of a new manner of reflecting on who we are.
ROOM 404
