Portland, OR – Bullseye Projects presents an exhibition of work by Jenny Trinks and Norwood Viviano. Suspended Time will be on view April 5 – July 8, 2017.
German artist Jenny Trinks begins her process by painting architectural details on multiple sheets of glass. These paintings are then roughly cut into strips, sandblasted, and stacked on edge. The resulting work collapses multiple personal experiences into an abstract and diffused composition that seems familiar and yet untethered from its original referent. 12 Places (2016) is comprised of images from twelve distinct locations that are cut and reconfigured. Each edge, when viewed individually, offers an unrecognizable glimpse of a time and place, but together they create a new experience akin to a dream or memory that is suspended between these times and places. “The work is about creating a feeling,” explains Trinks. “It is about the…search in the viewers’ mind triggered by…the traces on the surface.”
For his Mining Industries series, Norwood Viviano stacks cast glass cities, generated from LiDAR scans output with 3D printing, on top of historic aerial photographs of the same location. Susie Silbert, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Glass at Corning Museum of Glass, writes, “This positioning allows each work to contrast the present conditions of an industrial site with its past…simultaneously delivering perspectives of their present and retrospectives of their past.” The historic images are only visible in reflection from below or through the cast glass cities, resulting in a work that is caught between times. “Viviano exploits the optic qualities of glass to undo the smoothing process of history and lay bare the messy, illogicality of city building,” explains Silbert. “Looking through the lens-like surfaces of the pieces’ sculpted skylines, tract houses, bridges and rail lines—the histories of each site—are remixed…erasing their claims to authenticity.”
Jenny Trinks is a visual artist living and working in France. Her initial studies were in painting and photography, until she discovered the translucent properties of the art of glass fusing in 2007. Trinks completed post-graduate studies at the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle in Germany. Her works have been exhibited and nominated for awards internationally, including the United Kingdom, Czech Republic, United States, France, Germany, and Japan.
Norwood Viviano’s work was exhibited at the 2014 Architecture Biennale in Venice. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Grand Rapids Art Museum (2015) and the Chrysler Museum of Art (2016). Viviano’s work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions including Crafted: Objects in Flux at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and Visions and Revisions: Renwick Invitational at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery. Viviano received a BFA from Alfred University and an MFA in Sculpture from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Speed Art Museum, Louisville; Museum of Decorative Arts, Prague; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin; and the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington. Viviano is currently an Associate Professor and Sculpture Program Coordinator at Grand Valley State University.